I'm down!

yes same!! It confused me a lot and afterward I had to take 'barely' out of the sentence so I could understand it. We know that the current population meets the previous estimates so it's at least equal to it, but that it only does so 'barely' so I interpreted it as slightly above.

I think that 'in the short term' makes sense there because it indicates that the wild cheetah population is still at a similar value. If it also included the long term, there's no reason that the population couldn't increase

Nitpicky question but I wanted to be sure!

#feedback

"The current population barely meets the previous estimates"

Wouldn't that mean that the current population is slightly more than the previous estimates, because it meets it, but barely? So if the previous estimates were 500, you'd expect the current population to be 501?