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While poaching and environmental degradation have had disastrous effects on animal species across Asia, one highly endangered cat has seen a small but important rise in its numbers, researchers say.

The Amur leopard, which was once found across the Korean Peninsula and parts of Russia and China, is now considered the rarest big cat, with just a few dozen existing in the wild. But their numbers in Russia have risen from just 30 in 2007 to nearly double that in the latest count, according to the conservation group WWF.

The group said 57 were found in Land of the Leopard National Park in the Russian Far East. The park, which was established in 2012, is in Primorsky Krai on the finger of land west of Vladivostok, where Russia, North Korea and China meet.



An estimated eight to 12 Amur leopards live in China, the WWF says. Chinese researchers counted 13 Amur leopards between April and June 2013 in the Hunchun Siberian Tiger National Nature Reserve, in the Chinese province of Jilin just across the border from the Russian park. Results of a new survey of the leopards in China will be published in a few months and will show their population has increased, said Wang Tianming, a researcher at Beijing Normal University, without giving specifics.

“The number of leopards in China is extremely hopeful, higher than anything that’s been reported in the media,” Dr. Wang wrote in an email.

There are many uncertainties preventing a precise count of Amur leopards. The cats often cross the border between Russia and China, meaning that some could be double-counted. Also, some could live in adjoining areas of North Korea, though little is known about their population there.

The leopard’s numbers are still quite small, but environmental groups say the recent population increase is a result of the expanded protection of their habitat. The increase in leopard numbers is paralleled by the Amur or Siberian tiger, a larger cat whose range overlaps that of the Amur leopard. The Siberian tiger numbers have climbed from just 40 in the 1940s to as many as 450 in Russia today. An additional 18 to 22 tigers are estimated to live in China.

The Siberian tiger made headlines last year after one released by Russian President Vladimir V. Putin crossed into China, followed later by another tiger released as part of the same Russian conservation program.

“The fact that the Putin tiger came over and didn’t get poached, which was what everybody was worried about, showed that the Chinese side is starting to really be managed effectively for large cats,” said Barney Long, head of Asian species conservation at the World Wildlife Fund in the United States, as the WWF is known there. “If you look at what China has done for panda conservation, our hope is that this is the initial sign that China is doing the same kind of world-class conservation for tigers and leopards across the northeast.”

Although China has extensive forests in its northeast, years of commercial logging mean they often lack diverse plant species. That limits the food supply for deer and other prey for the big cats, Dr. Long said. But improved management in both China and Russia has improved prospects of rebounds in endangered tiger and leopard populations.

Still, the overall numbers of big cats in the wild in Northeast Asia are still quite small, leaving them vulnerable to catastrophe.

“When you start getting down to small numbers like that, a single disease outbreak could wipe out large amounts, a single really serious poaching incident could take out two or three breeding females and that could knock them back,” Dr. Long said. “This population of Amur leopards, by no stretch of imagination is it safe. But it is recovering and it is showing all the signs. It can be an exponential recovery if it is allowed to get going.”