Presence based habitat suitability modeling for wild goat (Capra aegagrus, Erxleben, 1777) in Bistoon Wildlife Refuge and Protected Area, Kermanshah, Iran

Document Type : Biodiversity

Authors

1 Department of Habitat and Biodiversity, Faculty of Environment and Energy, Science and Research Unit, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of Environment, Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Arak University, Postal code: 8349-38156

3 Department of Environment, Arak Branch, Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran

Abstract

Investigation on the factors, which mostly affect wild bezoar goats' habitat use relying on presence only methods, was the main part of our study. During spring and fall 2016 totally 13 environmental variables were measured in the species activity points (presence points). Ecological properties of 110 species presence points in the Bisoton wildlife refuge were compared and the species distribution modeling was developed. All models indicated that the main suitable areas for the species limited to the south and western parts of the study area. Regarding the ecogeographical and distal variables which affect the species activity and habitat usage, the output of three different presence only methods were completely different. Distance to the industrial and military centers in the spring and distance from rural areas, military settlements and terrain slope were the most important factors affect the outputted model in ENFA modeling approach.  MaxEnt modeling approach emphasized on distance to the nomads and vegetation type as the most affecting factors in both seasons. High values of species marginality indicate the special way of habitat selection by the species and its limited environmental tolerance to the habitat structural variables. To optimize the model,ctross validation was used. In the ModEco suite,the best performance was the domain model with AUC=0/9265. Our results indicated that ENFA produced more different results in comparing with other presence only methods like MaxEnt, Bioclime,Svm and Domain. We also find that MaxEnt with AUC-0/931 has better function than other modeling approaches.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Animal Environment
Volume 10, Issue 3
October 2018
Pages 17-28

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