Identifying Key Habitats to Conserve the Threatened Brown Bear in Northern Iran

Abstract

Many factors such as human activities threat brown bears (Ursus arctos) in Southern Asia, and limit it to small populations in remote and rocky mountainous regions. Brown bears are generally studied in North America and Europe, but there is little information about its conditions and requirements for survival in Asia. During the recent years, brown bear populations in Iran have decreased sharply. Therefore, they are now officially listed as a threatened species in local scale. Therefore, we tried to recognize brown bear habitat relationships in northern Iran using species distribution model (SDM). Maxent method was applied using multiscale approach to predict suitable habitats and habitat relationships of the species. Our results revealed that the predictive ability of environment variables and species distribution maps varied across scales strongly. Also, our findings showed that identifying a proper scale is important issue to improve habitat modeling accuracy. Only 17% of the protected areas was found suitable for brown bear and divided to 5.1% poor, 8.8% suitable, and 3.1% high-quality habitat. Consequently, it is suggested that the protected area of northern Iran reconsiders with interventions aimed at maintaining suitable habitats of brown bear.