Byron Weckworth, Chief Conservation & Advocacy Officer, Mountain Lion Foundation

WHAT WILDLIFE CONNECTIVITY REALLY MEANS FOR MOUNTAIN LIONS

Most conversations about mountain lion conservation dwell on numbers, how many cats are there in an area, how many are killed each year, what’s the population goal for recovery? As important as those are, numbers alone don’t tell the full story. To survive and thrive, puma depend on something harder to measure and even harder to maintain: the ability to move through a landscape without running into dead ends. That simple function, crossing ridgelines, navigating valley bottoms, slipping through the mosaic of human development, determines whether populations stay genetically healthy, whether isolated groups avoid extirpation, and whether historic range gets recolonized. Connectivity, more than any numerical figure, is the real barometer of the species’ future.

Connectivity, in the ecological sense described by Brodie et al., is less about individual animals moving around and more about how entire landscapes function as an integrated system. When habitats are linked, the natural mechanics of dispersal, gene flow, and population rescue operate as they were meant to in a fully functioning network. When linkages weaken or disappear altogether, populations are more vulnerable to the stressors of climate extremes, local disturbance, and the merciless pressures of infrastructure development. Connectivity is now recognized as a fundamental property of resilient ecosystems, influencing how wildlife responds to change and how species maintain the evolutionary potential needed to adapt. For a wide-ranging, low-density species like the puma, the integrity of these connections is often the difference between stable populations and the drift towards decline.

HOW MOUNTAIN LIONS MOVE: DISPERSAL, TERRITORY, AND LONG-RANGE TRAVEL

Mountain lions have evolved to cover long distances. Young males strike out on long, sometimes astonishing journeys, crossing mountains, swimming rivers, circling agricultural expanses, and darting through unexpected gaps of habitat. Females move less, but their choices matter even more. They determine whether a new population is even viable.

Across much of the West, the cougar’s ability to move is steadily being eroded. In Washington, Zeller et al. found that females face especially tight constraints as the landscape fractures. Males, usually the ones to push boundaries, have also shown signs of being penned in, particularly on the Olympic Peninsula, where gene flow is dropping to concerning levels. California’s coastal mountains tell a harsher version of the same story. Gustafson et al. uncovered the genomic patterns consistent with small and isolated populations carrying the concerning signatures of inbreeding. From Washington to California and across the West, these results reflect not the biology of cougars, but the barriers that we have built around them.

CAN MOUNTAIN LIONS NATURALLY RECOLONIZE THE EASTERN UNITED STATES?

This context matters when considering the prospects of mountain lions returning to their historic range in the East. A recent analysis by Glass et al. suggests it is possible. Their model shows how dependent recolonization is on the survival of dispersing females, and how unforgiving the Midwestern landscape can be, with an outcome that is a slow and patchy expansion that reaches only fragments of their former range.

In a positive twist, and demonstrating that wildlife doesn’t always behave exactly as models predict, mountain lions were recently confirmed to be breeding in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s too soon to plant the victory flag of recolonization, but this hints at the species’ capacity to push outward when even a faint pathway exists. It is an encouraging sign, but not a blueprint for broad recovery.

If we want mountain lions to regain more of their historic range, we should be honest with ourselves. Natural recolonization will be too slow and too sporadic in many places to build viable, robust populations. In some regions, facilitated recovery, via reintroductions, may be the only way to recover them. Ecologically, large parts of the East could support cougars again. The bigger challenge is not habitat or prey, it is people. Coexistence, policy safeguards, livestock protection programs, and community readiness all need to be in place long before animals arrive, whether on their own or with our help.

CONNECTIVITY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: A HUMAN-CENTERED DECISION

Connectivity is more than habitat corridors or wildlife crossing structures. In this age of humans, the Anthropocene, it is the sum of the choices we make. Decisions on land management, carnivore tolerance, and whether we want mountain lions returned to landscapes they once shaped but have been absent from for over 100 years.

The story of mountain lion resilience and recovery is the story of whether landscapes still function as living systems. The science shows what happens when the system starts to break down, movement declines, genetic diversity deteriorates, and populations lose their ability to adapt. But none of this is inevitable. Connectivity can be repaired, mortality can be reduced, and communities can choose coexistence over fear. If mountain lions are to remain a defining character of North America’s wildness, then the work ahead is clear: keep landscapes open, keep movement possible, and give species the conditions to do what they’ve always done.

Further Reading 

Benson JF, Dougherty KD, Beier P, et al. (2023) The ecology of human-caused mortality for a protected large carnivore. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, e2220030120. 

Brodie JF, Gonzalez A, Mohd-Azlan J, et al. (2025) A well-connected Earth: The science and conservation of organismal movement. Science 388, DOI: 10.1126/science.adn2225. 

Glass TW, Beausoleil RA, Elbroch LM, et al. (2024) Limited cougar recolonization of eastern North America predicted by an individual-based model. Biological Conservation 298, 110756. 

Gustafson KD, Gagne RB, Buchalski MR, et al. (2022) Multi-population puma connectivity could restore genomic diversity to at-risk coastal populations in California. Evolutionary Applications 15, 286-299. 

Zeller KA, Wultsch C, Welfelt LS, Beausoleil RA, Landguth EL (2023) Accounting for sex-specific differences in gene flow and functional connectivity for cougars and implications for management. Landscape Ecology 38, 223-237.