Potential habitat selection of wild Amur tigers in China

Abstract

The Amur tigers are the most endangered animals in the world, and the researches on the habitats of wild Amur tigers are of great importance for the habitat conservation of them. Based on the historical distribution data of wild Amur tigers and current distribution data of the Amur tigers in China, with the powerful data collection and space analysis of ARCGIS10.1, various influencing factors in the potential habitat selection of the Amur tigers including prey population, slope, slope aspect, elevation, distance to rivers, vegetation, distance to human settlements, distance to major highways and so on were acquired with digitized collection and space analysis, and the probabilistic model of potential habitats of the Amur tigers were established by logistic regression. The results of this study presented good the fitting effect of the Logistic probabilistic model of potential habitats. With the significance level of 0.05, after the hybrid test and the Wald test of the model coefficients, the ROC value was 0.920, which meant good fitting effect. The probability distribution plot of the potential habitats of the Amur tigers was then made by Map Calculator, and the study areas were divided into Not Suitable Habitat, Least Suitable Habitat, Moderately Suitable Habitat, High Suitable Habitat, and Most Suitable Habitat by the method of equal interval probability, in which the areas of High Suitable and Most Suitable Habitats constituted 9.95% and 19.72% accordingly in the total area, with the proportion of Moderately Suitable Habitats of 12.94%. Also, the suitability in the current distribution areas including eastern and western Wandashan Mountains, northern and southern Sikhote-Alin Mountains, southern Zhangguangcai Mountains, Dalong Mountains and Harba Mountains was quite high, and the suitability in the historical distribution areas including northern Zhangguangcai Mountains and the Lesser Khingan mountain range was also very high. Therefore, the establishment of ecological corridors to connect various potential suitable distribution areas is of very important significance in the conservation and expansion of the habitats of wild Amur tigers.