Modeling of habitat suitability of Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus gedrosianus) in Iran in future

Azita Farashi, Malihe Erfani | Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of natural resource and environment, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran | Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of natural resource, University of Zabol, Iran

Future climate changes can be effective in fauna distribution worldwide leading to its habitat destruction. Nowadays, many researchers have predicted potential impacts of climatic change on the distribution of plants and animals. Animals, as consumers at higher trophic levels are affected both by climate that has negative impact on physiological processes and land cover that provides habitat and other essential needs.

Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus gedrosianus) is listed as a vulnerable species based on the red list of international union conservation natural resource (IUCN) since 1990. Asiatic black bear has been recently evaluated as nationally endangered by human wildlife conflicts in some countries. The most important parameter in local extinction of Asiatic black bear is habitat destruction and fragmentation because of human activities. In recent thirty years, Asiatic black bear population has been reduced by 30–40% and it is predicted that the same rate will continue for the next thirty years unless effective conservation activities are implemented.

The Iranian black bear (Ursus thibetanus gedrosianus) has the most western distribution of the 7 subspecies of Asiatic black bear [47] and is different from other subspecies by nature [10]. Its natural habitats are increasingly becoming destructed and isolated from each other by human interventions and changes in land cover. Future climate changes can be the main threat to the species while considering their limited distribution in distribution areas. As reported, Asiatic black bears inhabit at higher elevations than normal in Nepal that it is possibly due to climate change [11]. The study performed by Almasieh et al. [12] also showed that climatic factors were important to identify Asiatic black bear habitat in Iran. Bioclimatic envelope models have been strongly implemented to predict species distribution model (SDM) in future [1,2,13,14], although the validity of these has recently been questioned [15–19]. Recently, many studies have predicted that species distribution in future will be highly variable [19,20]. Detection and quantification of variation sources are important for the purpose of improving the accuracy of prediction of species range shifts in future [19,20] Changes in the SDMs output might increase because of errors and uncertainties related to a) SDMs; b) features of species history; and c) changes in future climate scenarios (CC scenarios) [21]. Therefore, we modeled future potential distribution of Asiatic black bear under different CC scenarios and SDMs to obtain the best result.