Investigation of the role and ‎importance of wildlife corridors ‎between dareh anjir wildlife refuge ‎and Kuh-e-Bafq protected area ‎(Case study: Capra aegagrus ‎species)‎

Today, the migration and movement of organisms among patches has been considered to prevent habitat isolation. The purpose of this study is to identify suitable habitats for Capra aegagrus species in Dareh Anjir Wildlife Refuge and Kuh-e-Bafq Protected Area and connecting these two habitats. In this study, the maximum entropy algorithm and the least cost method were used to evaluate habitat suitability and design the corridor of Capra aegagrus species respectively. For this purpose, at first, species presence data along with eight environmental variables (direction, height, plant density, distance from the river, distance from the road, slope, vegetation and distance from the village) were entered into Maxent software and The utility map was prepared, Then the resistance map and the cumulative cost layer were prepared in Arc GIS10.1. Finaly Corridor command was used to plot the corridor using Arc GIS10.1 software in Spatial Analyst tools Distance. The results of the Maxent model showed Jack Nayef analysis, the most important factor in scattering of Capra aegagrus in the study area is the slope variable. In the ROC chart, The AUC value of the training data was 0.961, which indicates that the high detection power of the model (separation of presence and absence of species) is Excellent. Also the results of the least cost method showed that of the ten corridors plotted, none of the corridors interconnects the two zones. Therefore, in order to prevent the isolation of habitats, it is necessary to take appropriate management practices and create suitable conditions for the species between these two areas, because the connection between habitats is needed to protect and manage natural ecosystems.