Abstract
The golden snub-nosed monkey (GSNM), Rhinopithecus roxellana, is an endangered species on the IUCN Red List, and the Yuhe National Nature Reserve in Gansu is one of its principal habitats. The GSNM’s protection and management rely heavily on predicting its probable suitable habitat. The Maxent model was used to examine the habitat suitability of GSNM in the Yuhe Nature Reserve and surrounding areas. Infrared cameras used to monitor GSNM in 2019–2020 provided the model with data. Through analysis and screening, 23 distribution sites of GSNM and five environmental variables were included in the final model. The findings revealed that the Yuhe Nature Reserve’s area of appropriate habitat for GSNM was 248.43 km2, accounting for 52.79 percent of the reserve’s total area and that this was concentrated in the core zone. The Maxent model was optimized using the Kuenm package, and the resulting value reached an exceptional level of 0.948. A Jackknife test revealed that the mean diurnal range was the most important environmental factor affecting the distribution of GSNM (45.84%). Finally, the planning of the reserve was generally in line with the predictions, and the functional zoning could be altered accordingly. We advised extending the reserve southward based on the study’s findings, while strengthening the supervision of marginal areas of the reserve.
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The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the workers of Yuhe National Nature Reserve for their assistance and support in the field work, Jicheng Liao and Wei Zhao, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, for the guidance on the experiment, and Master Jie Hu of Lanzhou University for her manuscript writing comments. Furthermore, we express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable contributions to improving the manuscript.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31301889], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [lzujbky-2021-sp03] and the Natural Science Foundation of Gansu Province, China [22JR5RA468].
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SS originally formulated the idea and designed the experiments to guide the fieldwork. CZ, ZJ, DX, CS, BX placed the infrared camera and watched the video. CZ performed data analysis and collaborated with SY on image production, and SY wrote the manuscript. BX made several constructive suggestions on the optimization of the method in the process of revision.
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The research employed an ecological analysis based on the geographic location of the study region, life history characteristic data, and environmental variables. There was no field specimen collection in this study, and all experimental data came from video viewing. All experimental protocols were approved by the Institute of Animal Ecology, Lanzhou University.
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Shi, Y., Cheng, Z., Zeng, J. et al. Prediction of the potential geographic distribution of golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana) in Yuhe National Nature Reserve by Maxent. Biologia 78, 3579–3589 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11756-023-01497-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11756-023-01497-1