Ensemble of small models for estimating potential abundance of Caucasian grouse (Lyrurus mlokosiewiczi) in Iran

Abstract

The need to obtain information on population size to inform management actions for conservation is imperative. Despite this, reliable data on Caucasian grouse abundance is scarce in Iran. The goal of this study was to explore the potential distribution of Caucasian grouse using an ensemble of small models with outstanding performance for modelling rare species’ distributions to estimate the potential population size in Iran. We fitted an ensemble of small models with generalized boosted model (GBM) and maximum entropy (MaxEnt), and then built a final ensemble prediction by averaging across these two ensembles of small models.