Habitat evaluation of Levantine viper (Macrovipera lebetina Linnaeus, 1758) in Haftad-Gholleh protected area, Markazi province, Iran

Abstract

Haftad-Gholleh protected area located in the central plateau of Iran host one of the mountainous vipers, Levantine viper (Macrovipera lebetina) which can be regarded as west and northeastern subspecies. Habitat destruction and illegal live trapping to extract venom can be considered as some of the most important factors which threats the species viability. To determine the most important factors which affect the species habitat use, I tried to use to modeling approaches of MaxEnt and Logistic regression focusing on the eight different independent variables and 15 locations of the species present. Both models with high validation criteria (AUC> 0.98) indicated that around one percent of the protected area can be regarded as a potential habitat for the target species. Two distal factors acted in the reverse direction as distance from the Human related landuse (7 km) showed the highest priority while the distance from traffic roads indicated the lowest effect on the species habitat usage. Two other most important variables which affect the species habitat selection were distance to the water resources and altitude. The present work's outputs can be used in the species protection in Haftad-Gholleh protected area.