• Functional Extinction: The study highlighted that leopards are functionally extinct in Kuldiha Wildlife Sanctuary and Hadagarh Wildlife Sanctuary, while persisting at critically low densities in Rebana Reserve Forest.
• Density Hotspots: Leopards remain concentrated in the Satkosia Tiger Reserve (STR) and adjacent Mahanadi Wildlife Division, supported by moderate populations of medium-to-large ungulates.

• Prey Depletion: Critical collapse of medium- and large-sized wild ungulates (excluding wild boar) across several pockets.
• Landscape Fragmentation: Loss of contiguous canopy cover and corridor functionality between the Similipal and Satkosia landscapes.
• Poaching and Anthropogenic Pressure: Habitat degradation, retaliatory killings, and severe human-wildlife conflict driven by prey starvation forcing carnivores near human settlements.

Protected Areas & Locations in Focus:

• Satkosia Tiger Reserve: Spans the Mahanadi river gorge in Angul, Cuttack, Nayagarh, and Boudh districts; acts as a meeting point of the Chotanagpur Plateau and the Eastern Ghats.
• Kuldiha Wildlife Sanctuary: Located in Balasore district; forms an ecological corridor connecting Similipal Biosphere Reserve with Hadagarh Sanctuary.
• Hadagarh Wildlife Sanctuary: Located in Keonjhar district, linked with the Salandi river catchment.
• Rebana Reserve Forest: Critical connecting corridor forest in Keonjhar.

• “Functional Extinction”: A state where a species population has declined to such an extent that it no longer plays a significant functional role in the ecosystem or can no longer sustain viable breeding generations without external intervention.

• SECR (Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture): Camera-trap-based individual identification using rosette patterns to calculate accurate carnivore densities.
• Trichotaxonomic Analysis: Identification of mammalian guard hairs present in collected scat samples to assess dietary composition.
• RAI (Relative Abundance Index): Used to gauge prey encounters per 100 trap-nights.

• Prey-Predator Imbalance: Carnivore conservation cannot succeed in isolation without prioritizing ungulate recovery (e.g. spotted deer, sambar).
• “Empty Forest” Syndrome: Forests may retain canopy cover on satellite maps while being biologically defaunated on the ground due to poaching and biomass extraction.
• Corridor Severance: Non-protected territorial forest patches between major reserves lack rigorous protection, severing demographic connectivity.

Leopard and prey decline, protected areas of Odisha (Satkosia, Similipal, Kuldiha, Hadagarh), wildlife corridors and monitoring methods such as SECR and M-STrIPES are recurring themes for OPSC Prelims (Environment & Ecology) and OPSC Mains GS Paper III.

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