The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) has conducted its first-ever scientific leopard count exercise, and 718 snow leopards were reported. According to the data, Ladakh has 477, Uttarakhand has 124, Himachal Pradesh has 51, Arunachal Pradesh has 36, Sikkim has 21, and Jammu and Kashmir has 9 estimated population of snow leopards.

Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Bhupendra Yadav, presented the report at the National Board for Wildlife Meeting in New Delhi on Tuesday. The report also emphasized the need to establish a snow leopard cell at WII with a primary focus on monitoring long-term population encouraged by well-structured study design as well as regular field surveys.

WII conducted the exercise along with two conservation partners, the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysuru and WWW-India and all states that fall under the snow leopard range.

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During the exercise, 13,450 km of trails were covered and recorded for snow leopard signs, as well as camera traps deployed at 1,971 locations for about 180,000 nights. A total number of 241 different snow leopards were photographed during this exercise that was carried out between 2019 and 2023.