Gray wolf range in the western Great Lakes region under forecasted land use and climate change ...

• Main Authors: van den Bosch, Merijn, Kellner, Kenneth, Beyer, Dean, Erb, John, MacFarland, David, Norton, D. Cody, Price Tack, Jennifer, Roell, Brian, Belant, Jerrold
• Format: Software
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: Species distribution model; SDM; land use change; Land Cover Change; Climate change; Canis lupus; gray wolf
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8082777; https://zenodo.org/record/8082777

Land use and climate alter species distributions worldwide, and detecting and understanding how species ranges shift can facilitate conservation planning and action. Following extirpation from most of the contiguous USA, gray wolves ( Canis lupus ) have partially recolonized former range in the western Great Lakes region, but it is unknown how land use and climate change may alter amounts of wolf habitat. Using wolf observation data collected during winters 2017–2020 in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, we created ensemble models to predict how land use and climate change may affect the amount of wolf habitat within these states. A projection model for the western Great Lakes region suggested three of four scenarios of land use and climate change will lead to 9–35% increases in wolf habitat, while a solely climate-based projection model supported our expectation that changes in climate, in isolation, will have limited effect on current wolf range. Our results support stable or increasing amounts of wolf ... : All software required to run the code is open source and freely available. Running the models requires the R statistical software, along with libraries 'biomod2', 'dismo', 'dplyr', 'ggplot2', 'maps', 'ncdf4', 'raster', 'RStoolbox', 'sf', and 'tidyr'. ...