One of the reasons that this type of work had not been previously conducted for indigo snakes is because their ecology and habitat associations change across their range. With these data acquired, we set out to actually create our habitat model. For example, one environmental layer described whether each 30 by 30 m cell across the study area was composed of wetland habitat or not. Think of these layers as square grids where each grid cell has a number that describes some part of the environment. We then acquired a number of GIS layers that quantified various aspects of the environment known to be important for indigo snake habitat (many of these have been used in similar projects for other imperiled herpetofauna in the southeast Crawford et al. The final dataset included 1,215 contemporary (2000–2020) indigo snake observations that spanned from southern Georgia to the Florida Keys. We compiled indigo snake records from our own datasets, museum collections, partner organizations, and observations made by the public. We recently published an article in the journal Ecological Applications where we created the first range-wide habitat suitability model for Eastern Indigo Snakes (Chandler et al. The end result is a broad, landscape view of where a species may occur (note the distinction between occurrence and habitat suitability) based on the available habitat. The basic framework of this approach relies on relating species observations to a variety of environmental characteristics (e.g., landcover type, soil type, fire frequency, etc.) and then using these relationships to make predictions across a broader area. Known by many terms (most commonly Species Distribution Models or Habitat Suitability Models), these models provide a useful tool in the conservation biologist’s toolbox. This is especially true for species whose range encompasses large geographic areas, including a mix of public and private properties.īecause of these challenges, creating models that predict and map suitable habitat within a species’ range or a specific study area has become a common conservation technique. Indeed, field surveys almost always have large gaps in coverage because of some combination of limited resources, the cryptic or secretive nature of the species in question, or an inability to access certain areas for surveys. An important realization is that it is exceedingly difficult if not impossible to precisely determine where most species occur through typical field surveys. While this is an intuitively simple concept, species occurrence combines of variety of ecological processes, such as the environmental characteristics that create suitable habitat, the behavior of the animal, the movement ability of the animal, the geologic and evolutionary history that led to modern distributions, and, recently, how these factors interact with an increasingly human-dominated landscape. The species is very popular in the pet trade.One of the fundamental concepts in conservation biology involves understanding where a species occurs, either historically or in present times. It happens to be the longest native snake species in the United States. The carnivorous species derives its name from its iridescent underside. Indigo snake is a species of nonvenomous snake belonging to the colubrid family, found only in the eastern United States.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |