Feb 24, 2015 12:06 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A rare big cat known to live in southeast Russia and northeast China is apparently going through a promising population boom.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said in a statement Monday there are "at least 57 Amur leopards" in the Land of the Leopard National Park in Russia. That is a promising increase from the 30 the park held in 2007.

As many as 12 Amur leopards were counted in neighboring areas in China, which brings the big cats' number above 60.

"Such a strong rebound in Amur leopard numbers is further proof that even the most critically endangered big cats can recover if we protect their habitat and work together on conservation efforts," Dr. Barney Long, who leads Asian species conservation for the WWF in the U.S., said in the statement. "There's still a lot of work to be done in order to secure a safe future for the Amur leopard, but these numbers demonstrate that things are moving in the right direction."

Built in 2012, the Land of the Leopard National Park covers 650,000 acres, which covers the Amur leopard's "known breeding grounds," the WWF said.

"The national park became the main organizational force for leopard protection and research," Yury Darman, head of WWF Russia Amur Branch, said in the statement.

Russia's branch of the WWF, the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Amur Leopard Center aided the park in gathering the census data for the animal considered the rarest big cat in the world.

"Conservationists are working towards monitoring leopard populations across the border in neighboring Chinese nature reserves," the WWF said in its statement. "One of the highly anticipated next steps would be the establishment of a Sino-Russian transboundary nature reserve."

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