Sunda clouded leopards spend most of their lives in the leafy shade of the forest canopy. Equipped with exquisite camouflage, superb climbing skills and outsize canines, they’re formidable arboreal predators. But amid a development boom, the big cats’ uncompromising dependence on forest cover could prove a fatal weakness. A new study indicates that a slew of major infrastructure projects underway on the Sunda clouded leopard’s (Neofelis diardi) sole range islands of Borneo and Sumatra will severely erode forest connectivity in its core habitats and movement corridors, even inside protected areas. The study, published in Science of the Total Environment, modeled the impacts of three megaprojects — the Pan Borneo Highway, the Trans-Sumatra Highway and the relocation of the Indonesian capital city to Borneo — on the species’ key strongholds as a proxy for wider changes in forest connectivity. As forest-dependent top predators, clouded leopards are reliable barometers of overall ecosystem health, study lead author Żaneta Kaszta, from the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, told Mongabay. “Clouded leopards serve as a useful model species with which to develop predictions of connectivity to measure the impacts of infrastructure developments.” If the arboreal felines are thriving at the top of the food chain, the web of life beneath them is also likely in good shape, she said. The link between large-scale infrastructure and tropical biodiversity loss is well-studied. Prior research has found, for instance, that more than one-fifth of Southeast Asia’s terrestrial mammal species are threatened by road networks. By opening…This article was originally published on Mongabay