Study area and data acquisition
Approximately 580,367 km2 in size, Kenya is situated between latitudes 5 N and 5 S and longitudes 34 and 42. Kenya’s predominant bimodal rainfall and temperature patterns are determined by the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Kenya’s topography is diverse, with elevations ranging from 0 to 5197 meters above sea level. The dry land mass is typically represented by six agro-ecological zones: agroalpine (0.1%), high potential (9.3%), medium potential (9.3%), semi-arid (8.5%), and dry (52.9%). Agro-pastoralists and pastoralists predominately live in the semi-arid to very arid zones which make up 80% of the country . Kenya has 28 national reserves totaling 18,042 km2 (11.7%), 22 national parks totaling 29,357 km2 (5.16%), and 160 conservancies totaling 36,300 km2 (11.0%). Kenya has 68 important biodiversity areas (IBAs), with 55 of them threatened .
All raptor species’ occurrence data for the years 2013 to 2020 was acquired from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s online platform (https://www.gbif.org/, https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.hzyp6v, GBIF, 7th September, 2021). A total of 11529 records were obtained. These data were used to project the overall occurrence distribution of raptor occurrence in Kenya. From these data, we then selected raptor species that were endangered and/or threatened based on their IUCN status and selected the following five raptors: Steppe Eagle (Aquila nipalensis ) (EN), Secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius ) (EN), Martial Eagle (Polemaetus bellicosus ) (EN), Bateleur (Terathopius ecaudatus ) (EN), and Southern ground hornbill (Bucorvus leadbeateri ) (VU). As previously stated , in order to fully cover the raptor’s entire climatic and environmental range, records for the entire nation of Kenya were downloaded . OpenRefine software Version 2.1 was used for cleaning, which included removing duplicate records and records without georeferences. In order to eliminate data points with spatial correlation, and ensure independence, all records were checked in R for spatial autocorrelation using the K nearest neighbor analyses . We retained the following occurrence points following cleaning: Steppe Eagle, n=169; Martial Eagle n=267; Secretary bird, n=191; Bateleur, n=676; and Southern ground hornbill, n=25, for a total of 1328 occurrence records. We only modelled for species with more than 20 records of occurrence to warrant the precision of the estimates of species niches. These records were then used to produce SDMs.