Neo is still being caught by the trap cameras of the Caucasus Wildlife Refuge. The leopard in the video is Neo, who has been in a privately protected CWR area for a long time, meanwhile the other leopard Nova, was filmed during fall of 2020.

The long presence of these two leopards in the Caucasus Wildlife Refuge, is the best evidence of the effectiveness of the CWR, which is the first privately protected area in the South Caucasus managed by FPWC.

The idea of privately protected areas is widely used around the world, and in Armenia this role has been taken over by CWR, which is a new concept among the protection models used in Armenia so far.

 

In the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (ver. 3.1), the species is categorized as Near Threatened NT and the subspecies as Endangered EN C2a(i). According to IUCN criteria categorized as Critically Endangered CR C2a(i); D. The most imminent threat to leopard survival is range fragmentation caused by poaching and other human activities.