Landscape spatial structure for predicting suitable habitat: The case of Dalea villosa in Saskatchewan

Abstract

Prediction of potentially suitable habitat is im-portant for the recovery of species protected by federal laws. Therefore, the objective of this re-search was to study the relationship between habitat configuration and hairy prairie-clover occurrence in order to predict suitable and un-suitable bare sand habitat across the study site. Bare sand patches were extracted from a land cover classification of the study site and several patch scaled metrics were calculated to charac-terize habitat spatial structure. Binary logistic regression was used to determine which metrics were significantly correlated with hairy prai-rie-clover occurrences. The logistic regression equation was subsequently used to predict suitable and unsuitable bare sand habitat for hairy prairie-clover based on the probability of occupancy. Results showed that about 29% of the variation in bare sand patch occupancy could be explained by the size, shape, and de-gree of isolation of a sand patch as well as the amount of vegetation on a sand patch in the early growing season. Based on these variables, 18.8% of bare sand patches in the study site were predicted to be unsuitable hairy prairie-clover habitat, 45.7% were predicted to be mar-ginally unsuitable, 32.7% were predicted to be suitable, and 2.8% were predicted to be margin-ally suitable.