Mohamed bin Zayed Species project number 13056096

The project site is located in Gannoruwa Forest Reserve in Kandy District. The target species Prionailurus viverrinus is globally endangered and occupy a variety of habitats in the project area but its distribution is limited due to deforestation and other human activities. Therefore there is a conflict between man and the fishing cat over a long period of time. It has been recorded that fishing cat invades human settlements and kill domestic animals and poultry. Therefore, there is a threat to the fishing cat as well by humans laying traps and hunting and killing. Road accidents of fishing cats are also frequent in the project area due to its geographical location.

As a solution for this problerm ,I believe that all these studies and findings are done for an ultimate one purpose which is conservation of these threatened animals. By recognizing its importance and since there was no one working towards conservation of these small cats in my country I decided to step up and start my own conservation project. As a solution for those problems I'm came up with conducting awareness programs and youth camps targeting school children and villagers in the target sites. Placement of fishing-cat road signs and information board's at most vulnerable road kill points also help to minimse the road kills of this cats so far.

Other than that I'm working on population monitoring and conservation of fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus) in higher elevated areas including Gannoruwa forest reserve which is my base study site in hill country Sri Lanka. Evidences for their presence were detected with the aid of standard methods such as capture-recapture methods using camera traps, scat collection and pug mark census using Pug impression pad method. Further information was obtained through indirect evidences such as interviewing villagers and death records (road kills and other) from the area.

Along with that I was able to collect 64 regional records of fishing cats with the direct and indirect evidences and it was found that points were distributed throughout the area of interest, Hill country Sri Lanka. I'm planning to extend my work through the rest of the Island to develop a distribution model system for fishing cats using ArcGIS (10.1) and MODIS NDVI software's as this would help in locating potential Fishing Cat conservation sites and in Environmental impact assessments in the future.

As another work I have completed a threat analysis of fishing cat in 3 different districts in hill country Sri Lanka.such as kandy,Nuwaraelliya and Mathle. For that I used road kill records, poaching, electric fencing, poisoning records throughout 18 months start from January 2013 to June in 2014.