China news agency, Xining, October 23 (Reporter Li Jiangning) The Qinghai Tibet Plateau Snow Leopard Conservation Seminar and the founding conference of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau Snow Leopard Conservation Union were held in Xining on October 23. Experts at the meeting suggested that some eco-friendly infrastructure reconstruction should be done in the snow leopard migration corridor.

"The threat to snow leopards that we have discussed most in recent years is climate change," said Li Juan, an assistant professor at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University, who graduated from Peking University majoring in zoology and has been engaged in snow leopard research for a long time. "The higher the altitude, the faster the change. The warming rate of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau is about twice the average warming rate of the northern hemisphere."

According to existing scientific evidence, the Qinghai Tibet Plateau is the origin of snow leopards and its first hometown. The modern Qinghai Tibet Plateau is the most important and continuous survival area for snow leopards. The number of snow leopards in the world is about 7000. China has more than 60% of the habitat and population, mainly distributed in the Qinghai Tibet Plateau.

"If the climate warms, the forest line and the snow line will move up, and the habitat of snow leopards may shrink, and there will be some intersection and conflict with the leopard, which lives under the forest line and is also the top predator." Li Juan told reporters that, from the scale of decades, the habitat of snow leopards in Hengduan Mountains and Himalayas may disappear, Or it will continue to shrink. The process is very long, and many complex and unknown things will happen in the process.

What can humans do for snow leopards under the trend of global warming?

"The first is monitoring. There are many unknown factors in all our model-based predictions. How fast the forest line will rise, and whether other species, even humans, will follow the forest line, many things are question marks, so we have to monitor what happened." Li Juan said.

Thanks to the stable arid and semi-arid climate in the Qinghai Tibet Plateau, the glaciers cannot expand on a large scale, nor can the forest line move up on a large scale. Many species have been extinct in the past ice ages, while the snow leopard population is relatively stable. The habitat of snow leopards is relatively stable in the Altay Mountains, Qilian Mountains and the continuous areas of Tianshan Pamir Xingdu Kushi Karakoram Mountains, which can provide them with a climate refuge.

"It is not the situation millions of years ago now, and this time the change rate is very fast, which is different from that millions of years ago." Li Juan said that what is worrying now is that even if snow leopards can survive in the previous climate shelters, migration and diffusion are very important to maintain the stability of snow leopard population. With the intensification of human activities, the migration corridor of snow leopards is full of roads, railways, fences and other obstacles.

To this end, Li Juan suggested that some eco-friendly infrastructure reconstruction should be done in the migration corridor of snow leopards. "For example, dig some holes under some infrastructure facilities for snow leopards to migrate through, just like the life passage of Tibetan antelope."