Data and code from: Mapping for management: Habitat suitability of bobcats across Wyoming, USA

Résumé fourni par la source

Wildlife conservation requires reliable information on species’ distribution, demography, and habitat relationships. Carnivores pose challenges for understanding their distributions due to their rarity, high vagility, and need for large, interconnected habitats. The bobcat (Lynx rufus) is a cryptic and elusive carnivore that inhabits diverse habitats across much of North America, complicating a synthetic understanding of habitat suitability for bobcats. Moreover, bobcats inhabiting the mountainous landscapes of western North America have received comparatively little attention in terms of scientific investigations, and thus our goal was to spatially characterize bobcat habitat suitability using remote cameras and direct observations of bobcats across the state of Wyoming, USA. We paired remote camera detections (n = 73) and direct observations (n = 337) with environmental covariates to develop a statewide bobcat habitat suitability model using Random Forest. We assessed model performance by estimating the out-of-bag error and validated predictive performance using 5 withheld subsets of bobcat observations (i.e., a random sample of 50% of the direct observations). Our Random Forest model achieved a mean out-of-bag error of 15.93%. Independent evaluation indicated a strong correlation (mean rs = 0.93, p < 0.001) between predicted habitat suitability and withheld bobcat observations. Predicted bobcat habitat suitability was positively related to heat load index, vector ruggedness measurement, canopy cover, foliage height diversity, herbaceous biomass production, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, and tree occurrence. Contrastingly, predicted suitability was negatively associated with snow depth, topographic position index, distance to agriculture, and shrub occurrence. Results from our model estimated that approximately 50% of Wyoming has moderately to highly suitable habitat for bobcats. This work provided essential information on bobcat-environment relationships in Wyoming and within the Rocky Mountain chain, but additional research (e.g., diet, movement, population density, and genetics) is necessary to gain more granular insights on bobcats. Our analytical process can be applied in other environmental contexts to predict habitat suitability for bobcats and other elusive, widespread carnivores.

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