A young female mountain lion that turned up in a Redwood City backyard Monday morning wasn't just a lost cat — she's wearing a GPS collar as part of a UC Santa Cruz study, and scientists will be tracking her every move as wildlife officials return her to the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The incident, which prompted a police shelter-in-place alert for residents near the 1800 block of Madison Avenue, ended without injury to people or animal. But it punctuates a pattern The Dissent has tracked all year: mountain lions are pressing closer to populated areas along the Peninsula, and this capture put a live data point directly in the hands of researchers studying why.

Redwood City residents in the neighborhood around Madison Avenue got a jolt Monday morning when police sent an 11 a.m. alert warning them to keep pets indoors after a mountain lion was spotted in a nearby yard. By afternoon, the alert had been lifted and the big cat was en route back to open space — but not before getting a federal data collar fitted around her neck.

The animal, estimated to be one to two years old and female, was located using drones by a joint team of Redwood City police and California Department of Fish and Wildlife officers, according to Krysten Kellum, a CDFW spokesperson. The lion was tranquilized and assessed before being fitted with a GPS-tracking collar as part of an ongoing UC Santa Cruz study. She's now being moved to open space in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Kellum said.

"This appears to be a no-harm, no-foul situation where a mountain lion has left nearby suitable habitat and wandered into a populated area," Kellum told Bay City News.

The GPS collar means this cat won't disappear back into the hills anonymously. UC Santa Cruz researchers will be able to monitor her range and movement — data that can illuminate how young lions navigate the fragmented landscape between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Peninsula's developed communities. Mountain lions in this region regularly cross major highways and move through spaces that barely register as wildlife habitat on a map.

Kellum noted that the big cats generally steer clear of people and are "very wary of humans," but juveniles — particularly young females dispersing from their birth territory — sometimes end up in places they shouldn't be. "They will typically return to suitable habitat on their own but on occasion need CDFW's intervention to get back to that open space," she said.

The encounter tracks with a broader pattern: The Dissent reported in April that a young lion had walked 50 miles down the Peninsula and ended up in Pacific Heights, and in May that San Mateo County had declared mountain lions an "imminent threat" — a legal designation that opens the door for wildlife agencies to act more quickly in these situations. Monday's capture shows the system working as designed: assess, don't panic, collar if possible, release.

The 1800 block of Madison Avenue sits less than two miles from Edgewood County Park, one of several open-space parcels on the mid-Peninsula where mountain lions have been documented. How a young cat traveled from there into a residential backyard undetected is the kind of question the GPS data may eventually answer.

NBC Bay Area's SkyRanger aerial unit captured footage of crews working over the tranquilized lion in Redwood City. CDFW confirmed all details to Bay City News.