شيوا غريبي

Habitat suitability analysis for wildlife species, especially endangered species, is crucial. Bearded vultures (Gypaetus barbatus) are listed as Near Threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List and are on the list of endangered birds in Iran. In this study, we selected MaxEnt software to assess the habitat suitability of the Bearded vulture in the protected areas of the Kurdistan province of Iran. To date, no research has been conducted on the Bearded vultures across the entire province, and very few studies have been done in Iran. This research followed a survey-analytical method. We input data from 14 presence points of Bearded vultures in Kurdistan province and 14 environmental variables, including Dem, slope, aspect, land use, NDVI, distance to (ungulates, landfills, caves, rivers, springs, roads, and residential), and climatic variables (bio1 and bio12) into Maxent software. 25% was used for testing data, and 75% for training data. The model's AUC was 0.87, indicating excellent predictive quality. According to the results, the distance to ungulates variable had the highest percentage of contribution in assessing habitat suitability for these birds. After that, Slope and distance to springs were the most influential variables in selecting a suitable habitat for this species. The habitat suitability modeling results using Maxent software for the Bearded vulture in Kurdistan province showed that out of the total 29,137 square kilometers of the province, 1199.78 km2 had high suitability (4.1%), 1093.05 km2 had moderate suitability (3.7%), and 26901.14 km2 were unsuitable (91.91%).