Cougars will become increasingly common visitors to Southwestern cities like Las Vegas in the next few decades as climate change drives their prey to greener urban pastures, a new study suggests.

The hot, dry Southwest is projected to become even hotter and drier as mounting fossil fuel emissions trigger more frequent, intense, and long-lasting droughts. That change will reduce the cougar population, according to research presented Monday at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco—but it may also cause more of the animals to show up in well-watered towns.

David Stoner of Utah State University and his colleagues used satellite images measuring the food content of natural vegetation in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona to model how the extreme drought