Snow leopards haunt the rocky ridgelines of Central Asia, vanishing into terrain so rugged that researchers rarely catch more than a brief glimpse on camera traps. Locals call them “ghosts of the mountains.”
Their elusive nature, paired with the remote landscapes the cats inhabit, make them notoriously difficult to count. An estimated 3,500 to 7,500 snow leopards (Panthera uncia) remain across 12 countries. The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, lists the species as vulnerable to extinction. Kyrgyzstan, where the snow leopard is a national symbol, is thought to be home to around 300.
Now, a stretch of high-altitude terrain in central Kyrgyzstan has been stitched into an ecological corridor linking several of the country’s protected areas. The Ak Ilbirs corridor covers roughly 800,000 hectares (nearly 2 million acres) of pastureland, forest and other ecosystems across 14 rural municipalities. Ak ilbirs translates to “white leopard” in Kyrgyz.
Set up in 2025, it’s the first corridor in the region designed with the future climate in mind, project officials say. People still live, herd and work inside it, and the rules are built around them as much as around the wildlife.
“Projects like this are good for hope, because you can see changes at the policy level and changes in people’s mindsets on the ground,” Maarten Hofman, associate program management officer at the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), told Mongabay in a video call. “You can see people from many backgrounds coming together and working in one direction.”
The corridor was formalized by the Central Asian Mammals and Climate Adaptation project, or CAMCA, a multiyear initiative led by UNEP that brought together Kyrgyz government agencies, scientists from Humboldt University of Berlin, and two local conservation groups: CAMP Alatoo and the Ilbirs Foundation.
Michele Bowe, a member of the IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas who advised on the project, said it stands out in a region where this kind of approach is still new. “What really sets this corridor apart, and makes it unique in Central Asia, is the close involvement of local communities, facilitated by CAMP Alatoo and the Ilbirs Foundation, in its development.”
Snow leopards are a sign of a healthy mountain ecosystem. As top predators, they depend on thriving prey populations, mainly wild ungulates like argali sheep and Asiatic ibex, and the habitat that sustains them sustains everything else.
But Central Asia’s high-altitude habitats are facing pressure. Glaciers that feed mountain springs are shrinking. Rainfall is less predictable. Pasture quality is declining, and as it degrades and springs dry up, herders push their livestock higher into the mountains, competing with wild prey for forage. When wild prey runs short, snow leopards turn to hunting domestic animals, leading to retaliatory killings by herders.
“The degradation of high-mountain pastures will inevitably lead to a decline in biodiversity and, ultimately, affect the well-being of snow leopards,” Zharkyn Esenalieva of the Ilbirs Foundation told Mongabay in an email.
Herders are not the enemy of snow leopards, Hofman said, but climate change and overgrazing are increasing the risk of conflict.
Poaching is also a threat. Poachers hunt snow leopards for their pelts, bones and other body parts, which are smuggled for use in traditional Chinese medicine or for decorations. In 2024, Kyrgyzstan raised the fine for killing a snow leopard to 2 million som (roughly $23,000) as a deterrent.
To address these threats, scientists at Humboldt University of Berlin mapped where four target species — snow leopards, argali sheep (Ovis ammon), Asiatic ibex (Capra sibirica) and gray wolves (Canis lupus) — currently roam.
They used camera-trap images and wildlife sightings from Kyrgyzstan’s national biodiversity monitoring database, combined with environmental factors like elevation, slope, vegetation cover, and proximity to roads and settlements. They also ran climate models for 2040 and 2070 using data from the CHELSA global climate data set, and held workshops with local partners to ground-truth the results.
“We applied a combination of expert local knowledge, climate predictions and technical expertise to build the narratives for the future scenarios,” Julieta Decarre, the project’s lead modeler at Humboldt, told Mongabay in an email.
Under middle and higher carbon emissions scenarios, more than 60% of suitable habitat for these species falls within the corridor, she said. That means the corridor is designed not only to protect wildlife today but to keep working as temperatures, rainfall and weather extremes shift over the coming decades.
Only a year has passed since the corridor was established, and no dedicated studies have yet documented snow leopards moving between the protected areas, but a dedicated corridor monitoring program is underway.
“Observations by shepherds have already indicated that wildlife presence in the corridor areas is higher than outside, and with time, we will hopefully be able to confirm movement through direct wildlife monitoring with camera traps and other methods,” Hofman said.
The Ak Ilbirs corridor carries official protected area status, but it functions differently from most. Many protected areas keep people out; the corridor does not.
“The ecological corridor in Kyrgyzstan is based on a regulatory rather than a restrictive approach,” CAMP Alatoo director Murat Zhumashev and his colleague Salamat Zhumabaeva told Mongabay in an email. “It builds on existing environmental legislation, but unlike strictly protected areas, it does not involve land withdrawal or the introduction of strict prohibitions.”
