MaxEnt analysis of Ochotona rufescens, Oumm Qatafa

For pika, we collected the coordinates of 35 find spots of recent and sub-recent O. rufescens (Čermák et al.  2006; Khaki-Saneh 2014), a set of rasters representing current (1979 - 2013) climate based on standard 19 bioclim variables at 10-min resolution (Anthropocene, v1.2b: https://chelsa-climate.org/). These data were used to construct a Maximum Entropy model for the current distribution of the Afghan pika using the ‘maxnet’ package (Phillips 2021) in R (version 4.0.2). Other libraries used include ‘terra’ (Hijman 2021) and ‘modEvA’ (Barbosa et al. 2013). The model provided a list of variables that parsimoniously predict suitable environments for the Afghan pika, and also a projection of the probability of finding suitable habitats, as defined by the bioclimatic variables, in geographical space under present-day conditions. The values of the selected model bioclimatic variables at the present find spots were compared with the same values for Oumm Qatafa to examine its present climatic suitability as a habitat for pikas.

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Hijmans, R.J. (2021). terra: Spatial Data Analysis. R package version 1.5-8. https://rspatial.org/terra/

Khaki Sahneh, S., Nouri, Z., Alizadeh Shabani, A., Dehdar Dargahi, M. (2014). A review on habitats selection by Afghan Pika (Ochotona rufescens), case study: the Lashgardar protected area in Hamadan Province. Journal on New Biological Reports 3(3), 186–199.

Phillips, S. (2021). maxnet: Fitting 'Maxent' Species Distribution Models with 'glmnet'. R package version 0.1.4. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=maxnet.