Throughout Europe and Siberia, lynx are associated primarily with forested areas which have good ungulate populations (Nowell and Jackson 1996). In Central Asia lynx occur in more open, thinly wooded areas. The species probably occurs throughout the northern slopes of the Himalayas, and has been reported both from thick scrub woodland and barren, rocky areas above the treeline. On the better-forested southern Himalayan slopes, there are only a few records from Nepal (Nowell and Jackson 1996, Karan Bahadur Shah pers. comm. 2008). Lynx occur sporadically throughout the Tibetan plateau, and are found throughout the rocky hills and mountains of the Central Asian desert regions (Nowell and Jackson 1996).

The Eurasian lynx is the largest lynx, and the only one to primarily take ungulate prey, although they rely on smaller prey where ungulates are less abundant (Nowell and Jackson 1996). In European Russia and western Siberia, where roe deer are absent, mountain hares and tetraonids form the basic prey base. Hares and birds are important prey also in other Central Asian regions where habitats are dryer and less forested (Breitenmoser and Breitenmoser-Würsten 2008, Matyushkin and Vaisfeld 2003). Lynx kill ungulates ranging in size from the 15 kg musk deer to 220 kg adult male red deer, but show a preference for the smallest ungulate species in the community (Sunquist and Sunquist 2002). Home range size varies widely (Sunquist and Sunquist 2002), but averaged 248 km² for males (n = 5) and 133 km² for females (n = 5) in a radio telemetry study in Poland’s Bialowieza forest (Schmidt et al. 1997). Densities are typically 1-3 adults per 100 km², although higher densities of up to 5/100 km² have been reported from eastern Europe and parts of Russia (Sunquist and Sunquist 2002).