KATHMANDU — Rodney Jackson pioneered the radio-tracking study of snow leopards in Nepal’s Langu Valley in the early 1980s and has, since then, worked across the species’ range from Ladakh to Mongolia to the Pakistani Karakoram ranges. In 2000, he founded the nonprofit Snow Leopard Conservancy (SLC), which focuses on community-based conservation approaches in high mountain landscapes of Asia.

Jackson, who holds a doctorate from the University of London, was featured on the cover of National Geographic in 1986 and remains one of the most cited researchers in snow leopard (Panthera uncia) science. After retiring in 2022, Jackson serves as the president of the conservancy’s board of directors, where he works in refining strategic approach and impact, mentoring the next generation of conservationists, and special projects.

Jackson spoke with Mongabay — the third time, following interviews in 2008 and 2015 — on the sidelines of Society of Conservation Biologists Congress in Kathmandu, Nepal. Talking to Mongabay’s Abhaya Raj Joshi, Jackson discusses the state of population monitoring technology, the persistent challenge of human-wildlife conflict in mountain communities, and what he describes as a long-standing failure to center the needs of herding families who bear the direct costs of living alongside the species. He also reflects on the lack of collaboration between the two main international snow leopard organizations, and on what he sees as the field’s continued overinvestment in science at the expense of practical community support.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mongabay: In our previous interview in 2015, you talked about how technology is being used for conservation. What has changed since then?

Rodney Jackson: It hasn’t changed too much. Identification with AI is still very difficult. Still, humans are better. But many camera trap people do not follow — how shall I say — a systematic analysis. The problem is that a lot of people don’t set up the camera trap to get a picture from both sides. Obviously, to do that, you need two cameras looking at one another. But snow leopards have an almost absolute habit — mostly absolute. They will walk close to a cliff. So it’s easy to get a picture from this side, but from the other side it’s very, very difficult. They like to walk along the side of the rock face, and they scent-spray on the rock and rub their face and leave their scent. And you have to be fairly close to detect it.

Mongabay: In that interview you also talked about maybe, sometime, you would come up with some device where the snow leopard would like to rub against it and then we would extract DNA from it. How far did that idea go?

Rodney Jackson: I tested it in Ladakh and it got terminated right immediately.

Mongabay: Why?

Rodney Jackson: Because of the sensitivity of genetic material. And at that time, there was no lab really capable of doing individual IDs. This was in 2003, 2004.

Mongabay: So, there’s no scope for continuing that?

Rodney Jackson: There’s some scope. The problem is if two snow leopards come and you don’t collect the hair from the first visit — you leave it there and you collect the hair the second visit — you end up with an imaginary snow leopard. It becomes a non-individual, right? It has a certain genetic profile, but it doesn’t exist. So that’s one problem. You could put up a camera trap, but you have to visit the site a lot and that’s difficult to do. Because they live in difficult terrain.

But now the scat collection has become much better. You still need to collect, especially in cool temperatures, so it doesn’t degrade the DNA. And you need to make sure it’s a snow leopard first before you go on with the analysis. Then you start looking closely at individuals and classify them.

Mongabay: What technology do you think is the most promising that we might have in a few years’ time to help monitor the population and get a more accurate assessment of how many snow leopards we have left? Is there anything promising that you see?

Rodney Jackson: I think the scent stuff is definitely promising — except because of the mismatching of two individuals that become one non-real individual. But the more pressing technology problem is for human-wildlife conflict detection and mitigation.

The problem is that these animals come and visit the corral and they kill. The herd is asleep. They never hear about it and then they have this big problem in the morning. And you can put up a camera, but you don’t want it every time it records a picture to notify anybody — otherwise they’d be getting up and wasting time every time a dog goes past. So now there are camera traps that recognize species, and those exist. The next problem — given that those exist — is how do you get the message that you had a snow leopard sitting outside the corral or jumping in? How do you get it to the local people? Because there’s no cellular service. The message goes straight up to satellites, and California, New York, you’d know immediately. But the herder in the village hasn’t a clue what’s going on.

Until we get cellular service put in, which is going to take a long time because private providers are not going to make much money from it — we tried, we tried to get it — you could put camera traps that communicate with a relay signal up on the hillside and come down and notify whoever’s in charge to go out and investigate. You can’t do that easily. The problem is that permissions are difficult because they think you are providing an unauthorized cellular service.

Mongabay: This is about depredation. But for the other challenge — assessing snow leopard numbers and their presence — that’s the most challenging part to start any scientific investigation. You need realistic data on how many snow leopards there are.

Rodney Jackson: I just disagree. I think it doesn’t matter as long as we know that snow leopards are not very close to extinction. If we know that, we shouldn’t worry too much. We should come back every three or four years and check — is there a big change? No change? I suspect most times we will find it either the same or up a little. We don’t need this obsession. This has held up conservation for way too long. And this was a political goal of bureaucrats, of scientists — how many snow leopards are there? They wanted that answer. And nobody trusted the simple one of making an estimate by talking to villagers.

What’s interesting about all this is they’ve just done the analysis for Nepal. They’ve used genetics, camera traps, and it’s all Nepali — we’ve had no role in that. And they’ve come up with … well, they made a mistake talking about 397 as a single number. They should say between 390 and 410 or something. That would be much better. But anyway, it’s within the range of our gross estimate from before.

Mongabay: In the past, you used only telemetry and came up with a similar number.

Rodney Jackson: It means we estimated fairly accurately using a simple technique that didn’t cost too much. We could talk to the park people, we could talk to local people. We could look at the habitat, map the habitat, and the blue sheep population, and have a sense of how many snow leopards the habitat could support. And that’s what we based it on.

Mongabay: Globally, there’s this controversy about whether the snow leopard should be classified as Vulnerable or Endangered. What do you think drives that?

Rodney Jackson: I think it’s more to do with the funding, because endangered species get more. For Nepal, if we come up with 300 snow leopards, yeah, it’s endangered for sure, especially because unless you can maintain some contact with China, it becomes something else. But globally, the current one that maintains it at Vulnerable draws data from all the range countries. The one that’s not well represented is Afghanistan, but it has some data — some camera trapping from before. Nepal, I think their number’s a little low, but who knows. The coordination wasn’t that good. A lot of it is old camera trap data. You’re mixing something over 10 years. You’re making a lot of assumptions.

Meanwhile, we were talking about how many snow leopards there were in 1986. It’s taken 30 years. And in that time, community concerns have not been addressed anywhere near sufficiently. And I worry that, because of that, they will lose confidence and trust. Everybody says, “Oh, we go and talk to them a lot.” But they’re not stupid people. They’ve never seen you for 20 years and you suddenly come and talk to them with a new story. They’re not going to buy it.

Mongabay: Looking at the global picture — in the previous interview you said that on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, the problem is with livestock depredation, and in north of the Himalayas it’s more about poaching and trophy hunting. Has that changed?

Rodney Jackson: It’s changed a little. I think the habitat degradation is very spotty, but it’s very significant where it occurs. And the depredation is pretty significant because a lot of these remote villages are in good habitat. Blue sheep populations are not as robust or as high as we would like. And people don’t have the family size anymore to do daytime herding. So they let the animals out, look at them, come back and have some food, go back. And in that time, if there’s a snow leopard in the area, it could have isolated one and taken it and they wouldn’t find out until the evening when they brought them all back.

Mongabay: What about the northern part?

Rodney Jackson: We have not been allowed into China since 2006 or 2007. It’s all been done by Chinese, which is okay. They’ve doubled the estimate now. We had the number 2,000 to 2,500, which I think was good for China. Now they’re talking about 4,000.

Mongabay: What about the rest of the region — Mongolia?

Rodney Jackson: Mongolia has technically “lost” some. But we don’t even know if the older number was correct. You’re just guessing. The older number was something like 1,000 to 1,150 or something. The current one, if I remember right, is 980 or something. But it’s much more rigorous what they’ve done.

But even so, the camera trapping technique leads to a bias — you will miss individuals that have not gained land tenure rights. They’re going to minimize and avoid informing residents of their presence. Young males especially, but also females. Most camera traps are placed around scrape sites where they all come and communicate, especially during the mating season. I know of instances where young males are well aware of that, and in the time that the dominant male is being most aggressive, which is during mating, they will avoid going to these sites. So they get missed entirely.

If they do go to the site after the mating or before, they are considered as in the area without a home range — without what we call land tenure rights — if they’re not seen again. So that complicates things. How do you deal with it? You can put a camera trap at the scrape site they know about, and put one further down the trail where there’s no reason for them to slow down. It’ll take a picture of them. They may not come that way again, or they may go around. They’re very clever. But at least you can try.

Mongabay: In terms of the science and the rigor, which countries are leading?

Rodney Jackson: South Asia — India, Nepal and Pakistan — have more robust and transparent data compared to other regions. Mongolia has good data. Kyrgyzstan is beginning to get there. Russia has good data, but it’s always had few snow leopards. Tajikistan, I think has a higher number but poor methodology. India and Bhutan, I would say, are the most rigorous. Although, if you go and talk to people about the Ladakh population, they are outright skeptical about it. And this is a different area, different team, same technique. Who knows?

Mongabay: Do you feel like we need to move from this numbers focus towards real conservation — going to communities and talking about their concerns?

Rodney Jackson: It doesn’t matter how many people are studying this. The question with conservation is that by saving snow leopards, people in the government — or people who are pseudo-nationalist or nationalist — they claim, “We have 397 snow leopards!” But they are not paying the price. The cost is being borne by the communities.

Think of the villages in Dolpo. They’re small villages, maybe 50 households, 70 at the most. They see a team come in from national parks, maybe 30-35 people, and they’ve got these fancy collars and they put them on. During the time they’re in the village, maybe they did talk about depredation, but they didn’t convince the villagers that this could lead to a solution, right? And so within a couple of weeks — guess what? Those cats were killed. And they were killed by villagers for sure. They were just so angry.

Mongabay: In Bhutan, they have solar fences where the solar light also functions as a fox light, for charging phones, and as a fence for the corral. Is it practical for Nepal?

Rodney Jackson: It can be. We talked about fox lights before — I think it was in 2018. At that time, the fox light available was a very simple one. All it did was flash on, off, on, off. Same color, same place, same direction. It flashed around, but it didn’t flash irregularly — there’s a pattern to it that a cat would recognize very quickly. And then they become habituated.

Even with one that does random flashing, it still can become habituated, because they know it’s in that place. They know the light is there. And if the light is always there and nothing ever happens when they approach, they know it’s fine. This is a big problem.

What I’ve been trying to encourage — and it’s costly and it’s difficult — is to link the fox light to a camera trap, so if the camera trap is still detecting the presence of a snow leopard after, let’s say, five or ten minutes, it triggers a sound. And the sound is a good recording — a loudspeaker — of very angry villagers shouting. Get the hell out of here, you know, in the local language. Snow leopards would respond to that. That’s what we need. And we need that information to come directly to the local people.

Mongabay: We also see chemical scent deterrents being tried.

Rodney Jackson: I think it has potential. But where do you put the scent? What scent do you put? You would put scent from a snow leopard that’s not even in the area — just to fool the cat that lives there that there is another cat already there, so don’t go there. But you might attract it toward the corral. Then the problem becomes how do you prevent it entering. And there is a very simple solution I really want people to try, but I’m getting a lot of push back. And some good arguments.

One could be a solar electric fence. Another could be what we call a visual barrier — just put plastic sheeting around so the snow leopard cannot see into the corral. Because it can smell, it knows the goats are in there, it can hear them moving around. But the predator will not attack unless it can see its target. So the predator will either come closer, or maybe try to dig under, or maybe jump over. We don’t know. We have to test it.

Mongabay: We can’t stop the snow leopard 100%, right? There’s always going to be some depredation. So what about financial relief — insurance, compensation?

Rodney Jackson: Let’s talk about relief. You could set the policy that relief covers multiple losses in the same night. Those are usually inside the corral — 10, 55 animals, whatever it is. You compensate them from a fund. You would want to make sure not to insult them by giving them 30%. I mean, as a businessperson I would be insulted when I know it cost me 5,000 rupees [about $33] and I get 1,000 rupees [$6.6]. It’s not fair. But you’re not going to get many of those incidents — maybe two or three at most in a district.

For insurance — the pool is too small to capitalize. How does it get capitalized? There is a program in Nepal that funds livestock insurance, but it includes all the Tarai and the middle hills — people that have access to money. Remote areas could access it, but the validation that insurers and the government expect is just too complicated. Nobody’s going to walk five days to report something — and somebody has to go back and verify it after walking five days. Well, nowadays you don’t have to — there are mobile phones. They could take a picture, they could use GPS, so they wouldn’t be able to fudge the GPS.

Mongabay: Is there any program in the range countries that you see has potential for scaling up?

Rodney Jackson: For the corrals, yeah — those could be scaled up. Eventually a lot of corrals will be covered. But I can guarantee there’s always going to be corrals that haven’t been covered by those compensation and relief programs. We could go through and figure out how many livestock are lost in Nepal, in Pakistan. All of that. And it would maybe come out that you only need $2 million. I just throw that off the top of my head, right? Which is not a lot of money. The UN or UNDP could put it in. The problem is how you’re going to distribute and allocate. That’s why the capacity does not exist at the local level.

That’s because all the countries are different. And even within the same, from Mustang [in northern Nepal], from Kangchenjunga [on the eastern Nepal-India border]. It’s all different. So you can’t use exactly the same model. You use combinations. I think you’ve got to get the villages behind you. And if we could get some government money that would support income generation and livelihoods, and use that as a motivator — say, “Okay, real hardship, we will compensate at 50% or 80%” — yeah, you should come and join it.

Mongabay: The Snow Leopard Conservancy and Snow Leopard Trust are two organizations working in the same field and there are reportedly ideological differences between the two. What is the solution?

Rodney Jackson: The solution is peer pressure from everyone to require every organization to collaborate. To say, “Hey, we’re not going to support you unless you collaborate.” We need that pressure.

The Trust has done a lot of research and done research on what they think are the key elements. But they’ve applied them as — how would I call it — a list of values that they have that the village may or may not share. And nobody’s asking them what the village values are, and what process they should use to go through to resolve it. Their focus is more on science and more on publications.

Snow leopard research is very controversial. I think it’s controversial mostly because it’s so directed by academic research — they have different pressures. And the Trust does community work, but which is not necessarily beneficial for the snow leopard or the communities — it’s beneficial for their science and their publications. They’ve done a lot of work on testing corrals and reporting on it. We haven’t invested as much in the science because it takes money. We’ve invested more in trying to get the villages to adapt — to accept that corrals are good — and not trying to prove it at a scientific level right now.

Correction: The Snow Leopard Conservancy was founded in 2000 and not in 1981 as was mentioned previously.

Addendum Statement from Rodney Jackson, PhD

I would like to acknowledge and apologize for my response to the final question in the interview above regarding collaboration between the Snow Leopard Conservancy and the Snow Leopard Trust. I must also note that the interview was given in my personal capacity, and without the knowledge, consent, or review of the Snow Leopard Conservancy.

My comments were overly brief and did not accurately reflect the past history of critical conservation achievements by the Snow Leopard Trust and its partners, nor the collaborative relationship that has existed between our organizations, especially over the past several years. I regret that my remarks may have created a misleading impression and sincerely apologize to the Snow Leopard Trust, its partners, and Mongabay’s readers.

Protecting snow leopards requires collaboration, and I remain committed to working alongside all organizations dedicated to conserving the species, their habitat, and the mountain communities that share these landscapes.

Banner image: A snow leopard (Panthera uncia) in Cincinnati Zoo. Image by Greg Hume via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Scientific & traditional knowledge are key for effective & community-centered conservation (commentary)

Taking technology out in the cold: working to conserve snow leopards

Cite this article

Abhaya Raj Joshi (2026). Community more crucial than snow leopard counting: Interview with Rodney Jackson. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-321499

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