Using machine learning to predict habitat suitability of sloth bears at multiple spatial scales

Background Habitat resources occur across the range of spatial scales in the environment. The environmental resources are characterized by upper and lower limits, which define organisms’ distribution in their communities. Animals respond to these resources at the optimal spatial scale. Therefore, multi-scale assessments are critical to identifying the correct spatial scale at which habitat resources are most influential in determining the species-habitat relationships. This study used a machine learning algorithm random forest (RF), to evaluate the scale-dependent habitat selection of sloth bears ( Melursus ursinus ) in and around Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh, India. Results We used 155 spatially rarified occurrences out of 248 occurrence records of sloth bears obtained from camera trap captures ( n = 36) and scats located ( n = 212) in the field. We calculated focal statistics for 13 habitat variables across ten spatial scales surrounding each presence-absence record of sloth bears. Large (> 5000 m) and small (1000–2000 m) spatial scales were the most dominant scales at which sloth bears perceived the habitat features. Among the habitat covariates, farmlands and degraded forests were the essential patches associated with sloth bear occurrences, followed by sal and dry deciduous forests. The final habitat suitability model was highly accurate and had a very low out-of-bag (OOB) error rate. The high accuracy rate was also obtained using alternate validation matrices. Conclusions Human-dominated landscapes are characterized by expanding human populations, changing land-use patterns, and increasing habitat fragmentation. Farmland and degraded habitats constitute ~ 40% of the landform in the buffer zone of the reserve. One of the management implications may be identifying the highly suitable bear habitats in human-modified landscapes and integrating them with the existing conservation landscapes.