Predicting the Population Size and Potential Habitat Distribution of Moschus berezovskii in Chongqing Based on the MaxEnt Model

作者：Qing Liu, Huilin Liu, Xiaojuan Cui, Jianjun Peng, Xia Wang, Ling Shen, Minqiang Zhang, Lixia Chen, Xin Li · 发表于：Forests · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.3390/f15081449 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Species Distribution and Climate Change、Wildlife Ecology and Conservation、Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies

The forest musk deer (Moschus berezovskii) is a national Class I protected wild animal in China, and the IUCN Red list classifies it as globally endangered. It has significant value in traditional Chinese medicine and spices. However, wild M. berezovskii has faced a severe population decline due to human hunting, habitat loss, and fragmentation. Thus, studying its population size and distribution pattern is of great importance to develop effective conservation measures. Here, we determined the optimal MaxEnt model and used stratified sampling and the fecal pile counting method to predict the population size and potential habitat distribution of wild M. berezovskii in Chongqing using 133 species distribution points and 28 environmental variables. The results were as follows: (1) When the optimal model parameters were RM = 3.5 and FC = LQHPT, it had high model prediction accuracy (AUC = 0.909 ± 0.010, TSS = 0.663). (2) Under various climatic, topographic, vegetation, and anthropogenic disturbance scenarios, M. berezovskii was primarily distributed in northern, eastern, southwestern regions of Chongqing, covering an area of approximately 5562.80 km2. (3) The key environmental factors affecting the potential habitat distribution of M. berezovskii were elevation (36.5%), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI, 16.6%), slope (11.8%), and land-use type (7.6%), whereas climate and anthropogenic disturbance factors had relatively little influence. (4) A population estimation for...