Habitat Suitability Modelling For The Anjouan Scops Owl, A Cryptic Unstudied Species By Samuel Pelham Lloyd September 2010 thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science and the Diploma of Imperial College London i Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 Studying understudied species ....................................................................................................... 1 Aims and objectives ........................................................................................................................ 2 Thesis structure ............................................................................................................................... 2 2. Background ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Geography ....................................................................................................................................... 3 Economic situation .......................................................................................................................... 4 Biodiversity ..................................................................................................................................... 4 Threats to biodiversity .................................................................................................................... 5 Previous work.................................................................................................................................. 5 Red list classification ....................................................................................................................... 5 Morphology as described by Roger Safford .................................................................................... 5 Using biology of similar owl species to make predictions about O.capnodes ................................ 6 Biology of the Otus genus ............................................................................................................... 7 Methodology ....................................................................................................................................... 8 Detection ......................................................................................................................................... 8 Survey options ................................................................................................................................ 9 Issues with using presence and absence data ................................................................................ 9 The distance method .................................................................................................................... 10 Playback ........................................................................................................................................ 11 Variations in methodology ............................................................................................................ 11 Season ........................................................................................................................................... 12 Biology of the recorded call .......................................................................................................... 12 Habitat suitability models ................................................................................................................. 12 Definition ...................................................................................................................................... 13 Creating the model ....................................................................................................................... 13 Inputting species data ................................................................................................................... 13 3. Methods ............................................................................................................................................ 14 Study area ..................................................................................................................................... 14 Pilot study ..................................................................................................................................... 15 Survey design .................................................................................................................................... 18 Designing Routes and conducting point counts ........................................................................... 18 Calling activity of other species .................................................................................................... 19 Analysis ............................................................................................................................................. 20 Nonspatial analysis........................................................................................................................ 20 Analysis of playback ...................................................................................................................... 20 Analysis of call frequency .............................................................................................................. 21 ii Analysis of search effort with regard to elevation ........................................................................ 21 Habitat Suitability Model .................................................................................................................. 21 Environmental variable map ......................................................................................................... 21 Data input ..................................................................................................................................... 23 Identifying predictive environmental variables ............................................................................ 24 Model validation ........................................................................................................................... 24 Map creation ................................................................................................................................. 25 Distance analysis ........................................................................................................................... 25 4. Results ............................................................................................................................................... 26 Recordings ..................................................................................................................................... 26 Altitude.......................................................................................................................................... 27 Change in song frequency over time ............................................................................................ 28 Temporal distribution of recordings across the point counts ...................................................... 28 Double counting ............................................................................................................................ 29 Habitat suitability modelling ............................................................................................................. 30 Predictive variables ....................................................................................................................... 30 Habitat suitability map .................................................................................................................. 31 Validation ...................................................................................................................................... 32 Population estimate ...................................................................................................................... 33 5. Discussion .......................................................................................................................................... 36 Habitat associations .......................................................................................................................... 36 The effect of altitude .................................................................................................................... 37 Habitat suitability model ................................................................................................................... 37 Assessing the accuracy of the HSM............................................................................................... 38 Determining threshold .................................................................................................................. 39 Playback ........................................................................................................................................ 42 Source of error .................................................................................................................................. 42 Issues caused by using bird calls as a surrogate for presence ...................................................... 43 Consequences for future monitoring ...............................................................................................