The habitat suitability study of hyaena hyaena in the Haftadgholeh protected area

Habitat fragmentation is a dynamic process that changes the pattern of habitats in the landscape, decreases biodiversity and increases inbreeding. Isolation of small populations consider as a serious threat to the protection of animals, particularly in carnivorous animals. In this regard, habitat suitability modeling is an important tool to identify distribution and dispersion of species and effective factors on them. The striped hyaena (Hyaena hyaena) is one of the least known bulky carnivores of Iran. It has played an important roles for energy flow in ecosystems. The aims of present study are investigation of habitat suitability of striped hyaena using MaxEnt and neural network models in Haftad Gholeh, Arak protected area. For this purpose, presence, absence and presence of denning regions of species and absence of denning which were used as a main factor and 11 effective variable. Models are validated using ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic curve) statistical approaches. The results illustrate although both models succeed in prediction suitable habitat area and the selection of den of striped hyaena but according to the ROC in MaxEnt model the amount of AUC for suitable habitat and denning regions has obtained AUC=0.78 and AUC=0.76, respectively. As well as that, in ANN model the amount of AUC for suitable habitat and denning regions has been obtained AUC=0.69 and AUC=0.65, respectively. So results of current study showed the power of evaluate and prediction of MaxEnt model is higher than ANN model and it is near to the fact.