Quantifying the Effect of Environmental Factors on the Distribution of Brown Bears (Ursus arctos) in Zagros Oak (Quercus) Forests (Case Study: Ghalajeh Protected Area)

Ghalajeh Protected area as one of the most important Forest habitats in Zagros Mountains is located in Kermanshah province and is known for the Greatest Carnivorous. The aim of this study was modeling the Distribution of brown bear (Ursus arctos) using Maximum Entropy method. For this purpose, 168 Presence Points were collected in the annual period (2017-2018) for studying the habitat of species. 13 environmental variables including slope direction, Compound Topographic Index, elevation, distance from the points of presence of the tribes, distance from the stream, distance from the garden, distance from the river, distance from the road, distance from the village, ecotone, Heat Load Index, Normalized difference vegetation index and slope index were used as effective ecological variables on the species. The validity of the model was measured from the surface below the curve or AUC, which was calculated as 0.86, which indicates the high model's ability to distinguish between suitable and unsuitable habitats. Also, the results of the studying the importance of habitat variables were Jackknife analysis showed that the most important variables in the selection of brown bear habitat in Ghalajeh protected area are distance from the river, distance from the garden and Normalized difference vegetation index.