Fewer than 30 Amur leopards remained on Earth in the late 1990s. The population was so small that wildlife biologists openly wrote about inevitable inbreeding damage, and some considered the species unsalvageable. A new camera-trap study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) shows the density of the big cat in Russia's core habitat has increased 183 percent since 2015, from 0.65 to 1.86 individuals per 100 square kilometers.
Late 1990s: 25 to 35 animals worldwide
The Amur leopard inhabits temperate deciduous forests in Russia's Primorski Krai, the extreme southeastern corner of Siberia near the borders with China and North Korea. In the 1990s, its range had shrunk to a narrow corridor of roughly 5,000 square kilometers. The World Wildlife Fund estimated the global population in the mid-decade at 25 to 35 individuals, making the Amur leopard the world's rarest big cat.
The main drivers were poaching and the collapse of prey populations. Sika deer and roe deer were heavily hunted, cutting off the leopard's food source. Forest fires, often set to clear agricultural land, added to the pressure. The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the Amur leopard as "critically endangered," the highest threat category before a species is formally declared extinct.
2012: A national park with strategic design
Russia's institutional turning point came in 2012 with the creation of the Land of the Leopard National Park in Primorski Krai. According to WCS, the protected area was designed to encompass roughly 72 percent of the remaining suitable leopard habitat in Russia. Simultaneously, anti-poaching patrols were dramatically expanded, enforcement against wildlife crime was strengthened, and arson was more aggressively prosecuted.
Results appeared first in prey populations. Sika deer have recovered to record levels in the protected zone, which WCS researchers identify as the key driver behind leopard recovery. With more prey, more young survive their first winter, and adult leopards no longer need to venture into human settlements, where mortality from traps and vehicles is far higher. This is the mechanism behind nearly every successful species recovery: not protecting predators directly, but creating conditions where they thrive on their own.
2024: 28 individuals on 770 square kilometers
For the current study, WCS researchers deployed 130 cameras across a 770 square-kilometer section of the national park. Over 16 days they captured roughly 9,000 animal images, nearly 1,000 of them showing Amur leopards. By analyzing unique spot patterns, scientists identified 28 individual animals, compared to 16 in a similar survey from 2015. The resulting density of 1.86 leopards per 100 square kilometers is the highest ever recorded for this species, according to WCS.
Extrapolated across Russia's entire leopard range, WCS and the national park estimate the total population at around 130 individuals. The IUCN status remains "critically endangered," which is factually accurate at this scale. Disease, habitat loss, or a political shift could quickly threaten a population of 130. Researchers now face a new consequence of success: rising leopard density increases encounters with the Amur tiger, which shares the same habitat. For decades the two species had minimal contact because leopard numbers were too small. That is changing.
In comparison: What other big cat comebacks reveal
The Iberian lynx was even more critically endangered in 2002, with fewer than 100 individuals. Spanish and Portuguese authorities invested in targeted breeding and reintroduction. By 2024 the population had grown to over 2,000, prompting the IUCN to downlist the status from "critically endangered" to "vulnerable" in 2024. Both cases show the same pattern: when poaching is effectively stopped and prey populations return, big cats recover faster than most predictions suggested.
In the same region, the Amur tiger recovered from roughly 400 animals in the early 1990s. A Russian state count in 2022 estimated around 750 tigers in the Russian Far East, according to the WCS Russia Tiger Report 2024. In December 2024, Amur tigers were photographed for the first time in decades in a Chinese national park near the Russian border, evidence of the cross-border recovery of both species.
At current pace: 200 individuals by mid-2030s
If the total population grows at current rates, the 200-animal threshold would be mathematically achievable by the mid-2030s. A minimum population of roughly 400 individuals is generally regarded as the threshold for long-term genetic viability in big cats, below which demographic chance and inbreeding become persistently dangerous.
WCS is therefore working with Chinese authorities on corridor projects that permit occasional gene flow between the Russian and Chinese subpopulations. An exact census for the Chinese side is not yet available. The overarching goal: to move far enough from 25 individuals that no single catastrophe can push the species back to the brink.