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Karma Choki, graduate research assistant in South Dakota State University's Department of Natural Resource Management, conducted research in her native country of Bhutan on a forgotten big cat: the common leopard. 

is small, landlocked country nestled between Nepal, India and China and a world away from South Dakota State University. But that hasn't stopped one ³ÉÈËÊÓƵ graduate research assistant from conducting important wildlife research to benefit the southeast Asian country. 

Karma Choki is a graduate research assistant in the Department of Natural Resource Management. She came to ³ÉÈËÊÓƵ in 2023 after spending a year at a university in England. Before that, she worked as a wildlife conservation officer in her native country, Bhutan.

As part of the World Wildlife Fund, Choki worked to protect Bhutan's diverse wildlife populations from poachers and helped mediate human-wildlife interactions.

"Elephants can cause problems in Bhutan," Choki said. "I helped when conflicts between wildlife and humans happened."

Over the course of her six years with the World Wildlife Fund, Choki helped Bhutan restore its wild tiger population. In the early 2010s, Bhutan initiated an effort to double its threatened — but revered — tiger population. In summer 2023, the tiger population was estimated to be 131 — a substantial increase from the last survey conducted in 2015.

While the success of the tiger restoration program was encouraging, Choki noticed that other big populations were understudied. Specifically, Choki wanted to know: when the tiger population increases, what happens to the other big cats?

Cheeseman's lab
In 2022 while in the United Kingdom, Choki was trying to figure out her next move. She was just wrapping up a postgraduate program when she came across an Instagram ad. It was for an open position working with ³ÉÈËÊÓƵ assistant professor Amanda Cheeseman. 

"I couldn't believe it," Choki said. "It was just the perfect opportunity for me."

After arriving in Brookings in January 2023, Choki worked with Cheeseman to help design her research project. Cheeseman's work focuses on understudied wildlife populations, using different approaches to inform conservation management decisions for these species.

Initially, Choki didn't know exactly which big cat she wanted to focus on. Outside of tigers and common leopards, Bhutan also has an iconic snow leopard population as the country is located in the foothills of the Himalayas.

After some back and forth, Choki focused her work on mapping and estimating the population of the — a big cat that shares the same conservation status (vulnerable) as both tigers and snow leopards but is far less understood than either of the other two.

"Primarily, we wanted to establish population estimates in Bhutan for the common leopard," Choki said.

Bhutan is approximately the size of Maryland but has a rough, mountainous landscape that is difficult to navigate. Common leopards are also highly elusive and rarely seen by humans. To conduct her research, Choki had to figure out how to identify and estimate the big cat. She knew that the Bhutan government had been conducting semi-regular population surveys of the tiger population by setting up camera stations throughout the country.

After navigating the Bhutan bureaucracy, Choki was able to access the government's 1,189 camera stations — and the thousands of photos that came with them. 
 

Sorting through thousands of pictures is an arduous task. Choki not only had to sort through the photos, she also had to differentiate between the leopards she identified.

"We had to study the unique spotting patterns on the leopards to figure out how many different ones actually appeared on camera," Choki said.

Over the course of a three-month period, Choki, along with the help of Cheeseman and other students in the department, slowly went through the photos, sorting the leopards by the patterns on their coat. The spotting patterns on leopards are similar to human fingerprints in that each are unique to the individual. Each camera station had two cameras set up, which allowed the researchers to compare and contrast the patterns from both the right and left side of the leopards.

From the 11,075 leopard images, the team was able to identify 249 unique leopards. Over 100 leopards were photographed more than once.

"Bhutan has truly wonderful diversity of wildlife, "Cheeseman said. "Karma's work identifying over 200 individual leopards will be a great step toward better understanding and conserving this charismatic species."

The figures and camera station locations were used to model population density estimates for the entire country.

Choki's research is the first ever population estimates for common leopards in Bhutan. She believes this information will be instrumental for the Bhutan government as officials make conservation management decisions in the future.

"This work is important to Bhutan to fill in some research gaps," Choki said.

In October, Choki and other ³ÉÈËÊÓƵ graduate students in the department presented their research at the 2024 The Wildlife Society annual conference in Baltimore.

In the future, Choki hopes to expand upon this research to further understand how different environmental and human-mediated factors impact leopard abundance in Bhutan.