Fig. 1 Location of the study area and land cover in 1990 and 2020.
The government has established 11 national nature reserves and 54 provincial nature reserves in this area to protect biodiversity resources. North China leopard is considered the top predator in their range, as a result of large home ranges, Human-Leopard conflict has now reached a new level of intensity. North China leopards often attack livestock grazing in and around forest areas, where livestock keeping overlaps with the leopard range. At present, North China leopards are mainly distributed in several isolated protected areas supported by camera trap surveys and other evidence (Fig. 2) (Laguardia et al., 2017 ;Consolee et al., 2020 ).