Modeling Habitat Suitability and Distribution of the Ladakh Urial in the
Arid Himalayas
Abstract
Mountains play a crucial role in shaping the climate of an area and
subsequently, the habitat and species that are suited to those
particular conditions. Understanding the relationships between
environmental conditions and their influence on the occurrence of a
species is necessary to make informed decisions when conserving relevant
habitats. This study evaluated and compared the potential for different
interactions between climatic variables to describe the habitat
preferences and the range of the Ladakh urial, a narrowly distributed
sub-species of Ovis vignei, in the arid Himalayas. Habitat suitability
models were created from spatially thinned presence-only occurrence data
of 55 locations using a Maximum Entropy (Maxent) model. For this, we
subdivided the modeled habitat into habitat categories with varying
degrees of suitability. We identified a high cold precipitation to
annual precipitation ratio typical of cold desert climates well suited
to describe the highest quality habitat for urial. The inverse, low warm
precipitation to annual precipitation ratio was found to better describe
the urial’s range at the lower end of potential habitat. In this
comparison, we observed that with the exclusion of unsuitable cold
steppe habitat with a higher warm precipitation to annual precipitation
ratio, we were able to refine the extent of this species range but at a
tradeoff to the accurate description of high quality habitat. The
results have implications for identifying areas for the conservation and
management of the species in the high altitude rangelands of Ladakh.