COS 281-4 - Habitat Suitability of Common leopard in Northern Pakistan

Abstract: Conserving large carnivores in the face of increasing human populations with associated activities is one of the greatest conservation challenges. The current study was designed to investigate the habitat suitability of leopard in northern Pakistan. The major aim was to identify the most important climatic, anthropogenic, and environmental factors influencing the habitat suitability of leopard, to identify suitable patches of habitat >58 km square for leopard, and proportion of identified suitable habitat represented in the existing network of protected areas in northern Pakistan. The location data of leopard were collected using direct observations, scats, and camera traps during 2014-2022. We obtained location data for 206 leopard sightings in northeastern Pakistan. We developed species distribution models for leopards using an ensemble modeling approach. We fit four model types in the ensemble: generalized linear model (GLM), generalized boosting model (GBM), random forest (RF), and maximum entropy (Maxent). We used 70% of the input data for training the models and retained 30% for testing modeling accuracy using the biomod2 R package and we estimated the amount of habitat represented by contiguous areas at least 58 km², approximating the average female leopard home range size. Of the component models, the random forest model performed best (TSS 0.765, AUC 0.952). Habitat suitability was positively related to forest cover and negatively related to shrub/herbaceous and agriculture/managed habitats, the density of settlements, and roads. Habitat suitability peaked at intermediate values of elevation (about 1000–2000 m). Based on the ensemble model, we estimated 5,070 km² of leopard habitat in the study area, of which a total of 3,970 km² (78%) occurred in 10 contiguous patches of at least 58 km² (range 60 – 1460 km²). Only one patch of leopard habitat fully within protected areas was larger than the threshold of 58 km². About 28% of the total protected area in the study area was estimated as suitable leopard habitat. Increasing forest cover, establishing new protected areas, and expanding the existing protected areas network could help in improving leopard habitat suitability, since suitable habitat for leopard is not represented by the current protected areas network in Pakistan.