Habitat preferences of red deer (cervus elağhus l.) in Akdağ (Afyon) district

This study was carried out in order to determine the factors affecting the distribution of the species of Red deer (Cervus elaphus) in the Akdağ district, to modeling and mapping the distribution of the species. For this purpose, presence-absence data and site factors for Red deer species were collected from 116 sample areas in Akdağ district. In present study, the variables that will be used for modeling in the statistical process were determined firstly. Therefore, the representative bioclimatic variable was determined by using principle component analysis in the first stage. Then, the determined representative bioclimatic variable was included and correlation analysis was applied among all variables. As a result of the correlation analysis, variables with a pearson value greater than 0.85 were not included in the modeling. After determining the variables, classification tree technique (CTT) was used to model the distribution of the species. The training data set AUC value of the model was obtained as 0.96, while the test data set AUC was obtained as 0.68. The model obtained as a result of modeling is formed by 5 variables. The variables that contributed to the model creating were heat index, settlement-distance, hillshade index, roughness index and radiation indexrespectively.