Panthera tigris habitat modelling in Rajaji Tiger Reserve, Uttarakhand
Student name: Ms Puneeta Pokhriyal
Guide: Dr Neeti
Year of completion: 2018
Host Organisation: TERI School of Advanced Studies
Abstract: Habitat suitability is a foremost task in conserving wildlife and ecosystem. Rapid decline in wildlife and threat to their habitat due to unprecedented anthropocentric development and fragmentation of animal’s habitat has increased substantially the chances of human-wildlife conflict. Rajaji Tiger Reserve has the great potential to sustain the young migratory tigers. This study aims to find out the suitability of Panthera Tigris at Chilla, Gohri and Motichur ranges of RTR using presence only Species distribution modelling at multiple grain size. As, every model has its own strength and weakness, an ensemble model has been developed which provides better prediction accuracy. The influence of climatic variables for prediction of suitability of habitat for Panthera Tigris has been evaluated at 900 m grain size using Maxent, Ecological Niche Factor Analysis and Bioclim. Results shows that all three models performed well with accuracy of more than 0.7 ROC value. Distance from settlement, distance from waterbody, distance from railway track, Mean NDVI and elevation values contributes the most in all the models. Bioclimatic variables are not influencing the habitat suitability of PT. However, model’s accuracy has been significantly increased while removing the bioclimatic variables. This suggest that over-reliance on the climatic variables and thus constraining model at coarse resolution is not required. Ensemble model has been prepared using Maxent and ENFA. Only Maxent highlights the effect of different grain size i.e., 30m grain size has better accuracy in comparison to 900m grain size whereas all other models have more or less same accuracy at different grain size. Ensemble model shows that out of the 335km² area, 105km² founds to be suitable and 230 km² to be unsuitable at 30m grain size SDM whereas 96km² ,239km² area to be suitable and unsuitable respectively at 900 m grain size model. This shows that RTR has the great potential to sustain Panthera Tigris population. Strict implementation of laws is required to maintain by the Government, Forest department and also awareness should be spread among the local residents to better preserve the wildlife and their habitat.
Keywords: SDM, Maxent, ENFA, Ensemble Model, Panthera Tigris, Habitat suitability
