A Study on Wildlife Habitat Suitability Modeling for Goral (Nemorhaedus caudatus raddeanus) in Seoraksan National Park

설악산 산양을 대상으로 한 야생동물 서식지 적합성 모형에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study are to compare existing presence-absence predictive models and to predict suitable habitat for Goral (Nemorhaedus caudatus raddeanus) that is an endangered and protected species in Seoraksan national park using the best model among existing predictive models. The methods of this study are as follows. First, 375 location data and 9 environmental data layers were implemented to build a model. Secondly, 4 existing presence-absence models : Generalized Linear Model (GLM), Generalized Addictive Model (GAM), Classification and Regression Tree (CART), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were tested to predict the Goal habitat. Thirdly, ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) and Kappa statistics were used to calculate a model performance. Lastly, we verified models and created habitat suitability maps. The ROC AUC (Area Under the Curve) and Kappa values were 0.697/0.266 (GLM), 0.729/0.313 (GAM), 0.776/0.453 (CART), and 0.858/0.559 (ANN). Therefore, ANN was selected as the best model among 4 models. The models showed that elevation, slope, and distance to stream were the significant factors for Goal habitat. The ratio of predicted area of ANN using a threshold was 31.29%, but the area decreased when human effect was considered. We need to investigate the difference of various models to build a suitable wildlife habitat model under a given condition.