Land of the Leopard

Land of the Leopard National Park was created in 2012 at the south-western tip of Primorsky Krai, in the strip of Russian territory that narrows between China and North Korea, next to the Sea of Japan. Its creation answered a single, explicit aim: to prevent the extinction of the Amur leopard, the most northerly leopard subspecies and the most threatened big cat in the world, of which barely a few dozen animals remained in the wild at the beginning of this century.

The park protects some 2,800 km² of Korean pine, Mongolian oak and linden forest, an Ussuri taiga habitat that is especially productive because of the abundance of acorns and pine nuts, which supports dense populations of sika deer and roe deer, the leopard's main prey. Management has combined the fight against poaching, the control of fires set to renew pasture — one of the gravest threats to this forest — the building of a tunnel to divert underground a road that was fragmenting the habitat, and a system of hundreds of camera traps that makes it possible to identify each leopard individually by its spot pattern.

The results are cited as one of the recent successes of Russian conservation: the population has multiplied since the park was created and has begun to expand into Chinese territory, where an adjoining national park has been established and with which it cooperates. The area is also home to a population of Amur tiger and a Far Eastern wildlife community that includes the Amur goral and the Asian black bear.