Hotspot areas of Felid species in Iran under current climate conditions

In the recent decades, a lot of Researches which are focused on Predicting the geographical distribution potential of species with goal Identifying hot habitat areas. Iran has a specific situation and varied habitats. As well as, there is a limitation in management and conservation in Iran, so conserving of Hot habitat areas is the best way to conserve a lot of species in the large landscapes. CARNIVORA has eight families in Iran, which the most of species are in IUCN Red List. The main goal of the project was making hotspot map of FELIDAE, which has a key role in biodiversity conservation of the country. In this study, we used 19 climate variables from worldclim database and presence data felid species; and used RF, SVM, MaxEnt and BRT models in Software R for species distribution modeling. After the overlay of species distribution maps using the collecting layer technique in ArcGIS10.5, to create a model with a high degree of reliability, a comprehensive map for Iranian felids hotspots was prepared using layer multiplication method. As a result, felids hotspots occurred in central deserts of Iran, parts in the north and northeast of Iran and parts of the Zagros Mountain Range in west. According to matching of prediction map of felids hotspot with map of Iranian protected areas, the pattern of habitat potential has a relatively small overlap with protected areas and have overlap with 39 protected areas. The results showed that, the RF model was the best model with excellent reliability.