The Impact of Climate Change on Determining Suitable Habitats for Iranian Rabbits; Tolai Hare (Lepus tolai) and European Hare (Lepus europeus)

In recent years, global biodiversity has experienced a steeper decline over in human history. Climate change and anthropogenic interventions including habitat destruction, introduced species, and pollution are important sources of current threats to biodiversity and that loss of animal or plant species have a dramatic effect on ecosystem services. The current study aimed to prepare species distribution model of western rabbit (Lepus europeus), a species with high distribution, and oriental rabbit (Lepus tolai), a low mobility species in north, northwest, and northeast regions of Iran was conducted. First, layers of climate variables extracted from the BIOCLIM database. In next step, correlation of climate variables for each species was analyzed and then highly correlated variables were excluded from the modeling process. Finally, nine species distribution of the sdm package (GLM, GAM, BRT, SVM, RF, MARS, CART, FDA and MaxEnt) were used in the R softwares. The results demonstrated that suitable areas for Lepus europeus generally are western and southwest regions and for Lepus tolai generallyare semi-dense forests in north regions of Iran. In addition, max temperature of warmest month (BIO5) and precipitation of warmest quarter (BIO18) were the most influential variables for Lepus europeus and Lepus tolai, respectively. The results of this study can be used to better management of mentioned regions with emphasis on conserve biodiversity of Lepus europeus and Lepus tolai species.