Application of vegetation indexes in habitat monitoring of Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus) and Persian Squirrel (Sciurus anomalus)

Roe deer and Persian Squirrel are among indicator species of Zagros forests in the Bozin and Marakhil protected area. The aim of this study is to use vegetation indexes for investigate the trend of changes in vegetation indexes in the areas that species are present and also to compare their dependence on vegetation cover. 11 series of Landsat 8 satellite images during the period from 2013 to 2018 were used. Required pre-processing was carried out and then the NDVI and LAI were calculated for all of the mentioned images. Analysis was conducted in ENVI 5.3. Values of these indexes for the presence of each spices are provided and used along with the non-parametric Mann-Kendall method to determine the trend. K-mean clustering method was used to study the similarities of 2 species presence regions based on vegetation indexes. In order to clustering R3.5.2 was used.Results showed that there was a significant decrease in NDVI index in presence areas of Roe deer (P> 0.05) while based on the results, there was no significant change for Persian Squirrel. Changes in LAI in Roe deer habitat did not have a significant trend, but changes of this index for Persian Squirrel has an incremental and meaningful trend (P> 0.05). The results of clustering showed that the mentioned species have the possibility of coexistence in the central and northeastern parts of the region. The results demonstrated that vegetation indices can be used to monitor habitat changes.