In the first half of 2018, trail cameras at Land of the Leopard took 7,796 pictures of Far Eastern leopards, which is 20 percent more that in the same period of 2017.

According to the park experts, the expanded network of cameras and the growing leopard population are responsible for such impressive results. Trail cameras were installed at some 20 new sites in the beginning of the last monitoring period.

Experts also say that the number of images does not give direct information about the number of animals in the area.

“We are going to process the data and identify each adult leopard and each cub. After we receive and analyse the data for the second half of the year, we will announce the number of Far Eastern leopards captured by cameras in 2018. We hope that the results of this large-scale work will be summed up in the middle of next spring,” said Viktor Bardyuk, director of Vorontsov Land of the Leopard National Park.

In addition to leopard pictures, researchers retrieved 1,748 photos of Amur tigers, 1,496 photos of Himalayan bears and 9,656 photos of hares. Boars posed for photos 17,961 times, and sika deer set a record with 21,844 images.

Wildlife monitoring using trail cameras began at Land of the Leopard in 2013, and the network of cameras now covers 360,000 hectares.

Over 400 camera traps are operating in the park, making up Russia’s largest network. The cameras are checked every year.