A camera-trap survey conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 has recorded 34 leopards living within Guwahati city, one of India’s fastest-growing urban centres.
Researchers also documented a critically endangered clouded leopard and nearly 30 other wildlife species in the forests and hills within and around the city.
The findings highlight how big cats are adapting to human-dominated landscapes, often living close to settlements and sharing resources such as water sources.
Scientists and forest officials say the data could guide mitigation plans as infrastructure projects, including a proposed ring road, expand into wildlife habitats.
A new camera-trap survey has revealed that Guwahati, the largest city in northeastern India, is home to at least 34 leopards, highlighting the surprising wildlife diversity within the rapidly expanding urban landscape.
The census, carried out between November 2025 and January 2026, also recorded a critically endangered clouded leopard along with several other rare species including yellow-throated martens, northern pig-tailed macaques, Indian gaur and at least 29 wildlife species living within the forests and hill complexes in and around the city.
Spread across roughly 300 sq km and home to about 1.4 million people, Guwahati has seen rapid urban growth over the past two decades. Yet its forested hills continue to serve as habitats for wildlife that often live surprisingly close to human settlements.
The survey was conducted by a team led by wildlife biologist Kamal Azad under the guidance of Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Anurag Singh and Conservator of Forests Sunnydeo Choudhary. The city and surrounding areas were divided into 92 grids, each covering two square kilometres, and the researchers installed about 250 camera traps across Guwahati and its adjoining forest reserves for documentation.
The results came as a surprise to forest officials. In one grid, researchers discovered that a small watering hole on Narakasur Hill – located above the Gauhati Medical College – had become an important hotspot for leopards. Camera footage showed an unusual pattern of shared use between people and wildlife.
Residents from nearby hill communities, facing water shortages, often climb to the water source late at night to collect water. In one instance captured on camera, a person arrived around 1 am, prompting a leopard that had been drinking to quietly retreat. Minutes after the person left with filled containers, the leopard returned to the spot.
“Among many issues, we noticed that there is water scarcity during the lean months in forested areas. This affects humans as well as animals, especially on hilltops. Providing reliable water sources could help reduce scarcity and prevent conflicts,” Singh said at a workshop where the findings were presented to researchers from Wildlife Institute of India and a host of other conservation organizations. He also underlined that Guwahati city was expanding one to two square kilometres every year.
Singh also heads the Assam Project on Forest and Biodiversity Conservation Society, a government body.
The survey comes at a time when Assam’s government is planning to build a ring road around Guwahati, which would involve diverting a portion of Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary on the city’s south-western edge.
Forest officials say the new data could play a crucial role in shaping wildlife management plans and mitigation strategies.
“Such surveys generate baseline data which help broaden management plans and develop standard operating procedures for mitigation,” said Choudhary during the workshop.
This is important so that large infrastructure projects do not severely affect wildlife thriving in these areas. The data also highlights the high biodiversity value of Guwahati’s urban landscape, he added
Choudhary noted that earlier camera-trap work in a pilot survey in North Kamrup division had already detected 13 leopards in North Guwahati.
Presenting the findings, Azad explained that camera traps were installed based on signs indicating leopard activity, including pugmarks, rake marks on trees, scat and scent marks. Students from Gauhati University and Bodoland University assisted the team, analysing wildlife interactions and ecological patterns from more than 2,500 trap nights across two wildlife sanctuaries and nine reserve forests around the city.
“We recorded leopards in 36 out of the 92 grids where cameras were installed,” Azad said. “What surprised us was that we did not record leopards in the dense reserve forests of Rani and Garbhanga on the southern fringe of the city.”
Instead, the highest leopard activity was recorded in three hill complexes that include the Nilachal Hill, home to the historic Kamakhya Temple, and the nearby Adimgiri area, both surrounded by dense human habitation
“This indicates that leopards are thriving close to human settlements,” Azad told Down To Earth.
Researchers were able to identify 11 male and 16 female leopards by studying the rosette patterns on their coats; however, the sex of seven individuals could not be determined. Scat analysis also revealed that the leopards’ prey base had shifted.
Rather than deer species typically found in forests, many leopards were feeding on wild boar, goats and stray dogs – animals commonly found around human settlements on the hill slopes. “Interestingly, the barking deer population is almost absent in the hill complexes within the city,” Azad said. “We found more barking deer in the dense forests outside the urban area.”
The camera traps also recorded a surprising range of other wildlife species despite increasing human activity in and around the city.
Among them were clouded leopards, fishing cats, jungle cats, leopard cats, golden jackals, common palm civets, both large and small civets, yellow-throated martens, elephants, capped langurs and monitor lizards.
Several of these species fall under Schedule I of India’s Wildlife Protection Act, which offers the highest level of legal protection.
Wildlife researchers attending the workshop said the findings reinforced the importance of conservation efforts outside designated protected areas. Narayan Sarma, a primatologist at Cotton University, said the relationship between humans and wildlife in Guwahati should not necessarily be described as peaceful coexistence.
“The term we should use is co-occurrence,” he said. “There are also cases of human-leopard conflict. However, the baseline data generated from the census could help us study the genetic dispersal of leopards and other species.”
Experts at the workshop stressed the importance of mitigation measures as wildlife continues to share space with people in the growing city.
Retired forest official and wildlife biologist Prashanta Kumar Saikia highlighted the need to incorporate traditional knowledge from communities who live alongside wildlife. He said local knowledge could help shape better conflict-mitigation strategies and improve compensation mechanisms for people who suffer losses due to wildlife encounters.
Malabika Kakati Saikia, a scientist at the Animal Ecology and Wildlife Biology Laboratory at Gauhati University, called for community-based response groups to assist conservation efforts. “These groups can help respond quickly to wildlife sightings or conflict situations and support long-term conservation of leopards and other species,” she said.
Wildlife biologist Anita Devi, who works with the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change’s Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority, also emphasised the need to study wildlife beyond protected areas. She said tools such as geographic information systems and artificial intelligence could help scientists better understand animal behaviour and movement patterns in rapidly changing landscapes.