Biological invasions and land-use changes are two major causes of the global modifications of biodiversity. Habitat suitability models are the tools of choice to predict potential distributions of invasive species. Although land-use is a key driver of alien species invasions, it is often assumed that land-use is constant in time. Here we combine historical and present day information, to evalua...

The distribution and composition of wetland habitats for wintering waterbirds are heavily influenced by water level fluctuations. Through polder construction aquaculture activities, paddy fields ponds have decreased the lateral connectivity fluctuations in lake. However, impacts on habitat suitability, which can be seen using high-resolution images analysis, often cannot separate disturbances c...

A computer program, VVF, has been developed to assess the suitability of a territory as habitat for a species. It integrates several types of Habitat Suitability models into a Geographical Information System. In addition to standard GIS functions, VVF allows a user to create, modify and store new Habitat Suitability models for different species, to create Habitat Suitability maps by running Hab...

Measuring habitat suitability is important in conservation and in wildlife management. Measuring the abundance or presence-absence of a species in various habitats is not sufficient to measure habitat suitability because these metrics can be poor predictors of population success. Therefore, having some measure of population success is essential in assessing habitat suitability, but estimating p...

habitat recognition and knowledge of habitat requirements are extremely important to the wildlife conservation, particularly for endangered and vulnerable species. the purpose of the study was to determine which ecological and habitat factors contribute the distribution of black billed sandgrous (pterocles orientalis) in shirahmad wildlife refuge. sampling was performed in two season (spring an...

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of the north-central U.S. and south-central Canada contains millions of small prairie wetlands that provide critical habitat to many migrating and breeding waterbirds. Due to their small size and the relatively dry climate of the region, these wetlands are considered at high risk for negative climate change effects as temperatures increase. To estimate the poten...

The habitat suitability index, which reflects spatial variability in species occurrence probability, has been shown to exhibit various contrasting relationships with local demographic performances (survival, productivity) in several species. One proposed explanation for these discrepancies is that the link between the habitat suitability index and demography is influenced by density-dependent, ...

The Hooded Crow (Corvus cornix) is often considered the main nest predator of many bird species, especially waterbirds. Such relationship should be particularly clear during the breeding season in wetlands, when the need to supply their nestlings with the highest quality foods forces predators to intensify their hunting activities. Hence, waterbirds should be their basic prey. We examined the c...

In this paper we present work in progress for developing a semantic modeling system for wildlife monitoring, management and conservation. Based on a Greek NGO experience in large carnivores conservation in the mountain ecosystems of northern Greece, we present a generic architecture for wildlife information fusion, sharing and reuse. Our framework employs ontologies for representing the key dom...