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Modeling Habitat Suitability and Distribution of the Ladakh Urial in the Arid Himalayas
  • Jeremy Roy Lambe,
  • Mohd Raza,
  • Tsewang Namgail
Jeremy Roy Lambe
Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust

Corresponding Author:jlambe@ualberta.ca

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Mohd Raza
Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust
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Tsewang Namgail
Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust
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Abstract

Mountains play a crucial role in shaping the climate of an area and subsequently, the habitat and species that are suited to those particular conditions. Understanding the relationships between environmental conditions and their influence on the occurrence of a species is necessary to make informed decisions when conserving relevant habitats. This study evaluated and compared the potential for different interactions between climatic variables to describe the habitat preferences and the range of the Ladakh urial, a narrowly distributed sub-species of Ovis vignei, in the arid Himalayas. Habitat suitability models were created from spatially thinned presence-only occurrence data of 55 locations using a Maximum Entropy (Maxent) model. For this, we subdivided the modeled habitat into habitat categories with varying degrees of suitability. We identified a high cold precipitation to annual precipitation ratio typical of cold desert climates well suited to describe the highest quality habitat for urial. The inverse, low warm precipitation to annual precipitation ratio was found to better describe the urial’s range at the lower end of potential habitat. In this comparison, we observed that with the exclusion of unsuitable cold steppe habitat with a higher warm precipitation to annual precipitation ratio, we were able to refine the extent of this species range but at a tradeoff to the accurate description of high quality habitat. The results have implications for identifying areas for the conservation and management of the species in the high altitude rangelands of Ladakh.
Submitted to Ecology and Evolution
07 Jun 2024Submission Checks Completed
07 Jun 2024Assigned to Editor
14 Jun 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned
04 Jul 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
22 Jul 2024Editorial Decision: Revise Minor
12 Sep 20241st Revision Received
13 Sep 2024Submission Checks Completed
13 Sep 2024Assigned to Editor
13 Sep 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
13 Sep 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned
20 Sep 2024Editorial Decision: Accept