Abstract
The management of multi-use forests often drives forest fragmentation, which leads to decreased habitat areas and quality. We explored suitable habitat distributions of cervids to evaluate the conflict between small-scale human management and large-scale habitat conservation in human-disturbed forest landscapes. We estimated the potential habitat of roe deer (Capreolus pygargus) and determined the contribution of multiple environmental factors to habitat distribution using the presence of roe deer (N = 106) in a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model. We simulated changes in the suitable habitat and characteristics of landscape patterns based on three forest management area scenarios. The results showed that the potential suitable habitat for roe deer was located mainly in the east. The variables affecting habitat suitability were similar in different scenarios, and included distance to farmland, settlements, rivers and management areas, and elevation. Distance to the management area was found to affect habitat suitability with a contribution probability from 4% to 6%. With an increase in the management area, the suitable habitat decreased. Landscape indexes showed that habitat quality decreased with management area expansion, but patch fragmentation was not aggravated. The expansion of the management area increased the range of human disturbance and had a negative impact on habitat area and quality, which adversely affected the environmental suitability for roe deer.
Highlights
Forest management activities often have a negative impact on the habitat and living conditions of wild animals [1]
The evaluation of the ROC curve indicated that the average AUC values of the roe deer model for the training set and validation set were all greater than 0.9 under each scenario, suggesting that the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) models yielded good accuracy and could be used to predict potential deer habitat in our study area (Table 1)
Using MaxEnt to study the occurrence of roe deer allowed us to elucidate habitat suitability within the study area and assess the relative influence of environmental factors on their distribution patterns
Summary
Forest management activities often have a negative impact on the habitat and living conditions of wild animals [1]. The pattern, intensity and scope of forestry activities can affect the habitat of wild animals. These forestry activities are largely determined by the forest ownership system, which means that changes to the system guide these forestry activities. There are a variety of management measures for the understory layer, plus increased frequency and scope of management, which affect indicators such as the distribution, abundance and coverage of vegetation, and which result in the spatial fragmentation of the forest landscape and habitat degradation for wild animals [3,4]. The trend towards decentralized management guides human activities, directly affecting the habitat of most wild animals [5,6,7]. Since 2012, commercial logging has been banned in the Lesser Xing’an Mountains
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