Evaluation of the effects of Oak Forest changes on Persian Squirrel (Sciurus anomalus) habitat selection

The Zagros region with almost 5 million hectares of forest accounts for about 40% of the total forests in Iran. The overexploitation of Zagros forests over many years has turned these valuable forests into sensitive and fragile ecosystems. Therefore, it is essential to plan for the future of forests based on their expansion trends over the past decades. The Persian Squirrel holds paramount significance among the mammals living in Zagros oak forests. Acquiring comprehensive knowledge of the habitat needs of this species is imperative to formulate effective management policies aimed at its preservation. In this study, quantitative (surface and density) changes in the forests of Lorestan province were examined using Landsat satellite images (1993–2022). The maximum disorder software (Maxent) was used to prepare habitat desirability maps of the Persian Squirrel. The classification was carried out using a supervised method and by classifying educational samples and using the normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI). The classification accuracy was 94% for TM imagery and 98% for OLI imagery with Kappa coefficients of 86% and 98%, respectively. Forest and Non- Forest areas covered 560,955.072 and 2,268,422.076 hectares of the study area in 1993 respectively. For 2022, these amounts were 409,148.81 and 2,420,249.49, respectively. In total, a staggering 5.6% of the forest area in the study area has been destroyed in recent decades. The forest density change was estimated using the FCD model, with the highest values being 0–10% in the two periods. The results showed that most of the suitable habitats for the Persian Squirrel were located in the south and southwest of the province (93% = AUC). The main variables affecting this species' habitat desirability included distance from rivers and precipitation during the driest three months of the year.