The studying of qualitative and quantitative changes of Persian squirrel’s habitat in Lorestan Province’s forests by 2050 based on CCSM4 climatic model

According to IUCN estimates, about 30% of the extinction of species until 1980 was due to habitat destruction. Climate change has been recognized as the most important factors of habitat destruction in recent years. Forest are one of the most sensitive ecosystems to climate change, hence forest species such as squirrels are very vulnerable to climate change. Predicting the effects of climate change on species habitats can assist in species conservation planning. Habitat modelling is one of the most widely used methods to study the effects of climate change on species and their habitats in the near and far future and the maximum entropy model is one of the most efficient models in this field. For this purpose, in this study the maximum entropy model was used to identify suitable habitats for Persian squirrel in Lorestan province’s forests both in the present time and in the future depend on the CCSM4 climatic model by 2050. The AUC of 0.92 represents the satisfactory performance of this model in this study. Results indicated that about 57% of forests in Lorestan province are suitable for Persian squirrel, of which 17.78% has high suitability, 25.59% moderate suitability and 13.63% low suitability. In addition, the results indicated suitable forested areas for Persian squirrel will decrease from 57% to 22.58% by 2050 based on CCSM4 climatic model, of which 5.36 will have high suitability, 8.2% moderate suitability and 8.99% low suitability.