It may be a charismatic subspecies, but the IUCN currently follows Culver et al. (2000)'s genetic research for subspecific designation. It suggests all North American pumas belong to one subspecies. This assertion is reinforced by the IUCN Cat Classification Task Force.
Kitchener A, Breitenmoser C, Eizirik E, Gentry A, Werdelin L, Wilting A, Yamaguchi N, Abramov A, Christiansen P, Driscoll C, Duckworth W, Johnson W, Luo S, Meijaard E, O’Donoghue P, Sanderson J, Seymour K, Bruford M, Groves C & Tobe S. 2017. A revised taxonomy of the Felidae: the final report of the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN/SSC Cat Specialist Group. Cat News Special Issue. 80 pp. (Link)
Unintended disagreements occur when a parent (B) is
thinned by swapping a child (E) to another part of the
taxonomic tree, resulting in existing IDs of the parent being interpreted
as disagreements with existing IDs of the swapped child.
Identification
ID 2 of taxon E will be an unintended disagreement with ID 1 of taxon B after the taxon swap
If thinning a parent results in more than 10 unintended disagreements, you
should split the parent after swapping the child to replace existing IDs
of the parent (B) with IDs that don't disagree.
