DOI: 10.5061/dryad.v103v
title: Modelling seasonal habitat suitability for wide-ranging species: Invasive wild pigs in northern Australia

description: Invasive wildlife often causes serious damage to the economy and
 agriculture as well as environmental, human and animal health. Habitat
 models can fill knowledge gaps about species distributions and assist
 planning to mitigate impacts. Yet, model accuracy and utility may be
 compromised by small study areas and limited integration of species
 ecology or temporal variability. Here we modelled seasonal habitat
 suitability for wild pigs, a widespread and harmful invader, in northern
 Australia. We developed a resource-based, spatially-explicit and
 regional-scale approach using Bayesian networks and spatial pattern
 suitability analysis. We integrated important ecological factors such as
 variability in environmental conditions, breeding requirements and home
 range movements. The habitat model was parameterized during a structured,
 iterative expert elicitation process and applied to a wet season and a dry
 season scenario. Model performance and uncertainty was evaluated against
 independent distributional data sets. Validation results showed that an
 expert-averaged model accurately predicted empirical wild pig presences in
 northern Australia for both seasonal scenarios. Model uncertainty was
 largely associated with different expert assumptions about wild pigs’
 resource-seeking home range movements. Habitat suitability varied
 considerably between seasons, retracting to resource-abundant rainforest,
 wetland and agricultural refuge areas during the dry season and expanding
 widely into surrounding grassland floodplains, savanna woodlands and
 coastal shrubs during the wet season. Overall, our model suggested that
 suitable wild pig habitat is less widely available in northern Australia
 than previously thought. Mapped results may be used to quantify impacts,
 assess risks, justify management investments and target control
 activities. Our methods are applicable to other wide-ranging species,
 especially in data-poor situations.
description: Seasonal wild pig
 habitat suitability in northern Australia: mapped
 resultsThis dataset contains
 mapped results from a resource-based, spatially-explicit and
 regional-scale habitat model for wild pigs in northern Australia. The
 modelled habitat suitability index (HSI) describes relative habitat
 quality for wild pig breeding and persistence during the dry (using data
 from March/April) and wet (using data from October/November) season. HSI
 values in this dataset effectively range between 11 and 81. They can be
 broadly classified as follows: HSI ≥ 60 = highly suitable habitat; HSI ≥
 40 = moderately suitable habitat; HSI &lt; 40 unsuitable habitat.
 Underlying model parameters were elicited from experts. This dataset
 contains results from an expert-averaged model run. The model contained a
 variable "Disturbance stress" for which no spatial data proxies
 were available. In this dataset, we assumed a uniformly “high” intensity
 and frequency of control activities, which likely overestimated
 disturbance and undervalued habitat suitability. For further detail on
 modelling methods and assumptions please consult the accompanying
 publication Froese et al. (2017). For each seasonal dataset, a
 georeferenced compressed .TIF file, a metadata .XML file, and an ESRI
 ArcGIS .LYR file visualizing an appropriate classification scheme are
 provided.Seasonal-wild-pig-HSI.zipData inputs for spatial pattern suitability analysis and model validationThis dataset contains input data necessary to reproduce analyses described in Froese et al. (submitted) and its supplementary information. The dataset is divided into two sub-folders. Folder "S3Appendix" contains data for spatial pattern suitability analysis, including distance-dependent response-to-pattern curves (folder "fD", .CSV format) as elicited from six wild pig experts, and raster data (folder "GIS", .TIF format) describing modelled resource quality indices. Folder "S4Appendix" contains data for model validation of each seasonal scenario (folders "dry" and "wet", .TXT format), including the expected habitat suitability index across validation backgrounds and the predicted habitat suitability index at wild pig presence records. Each "Expected" and "Predicted" folder contains 28 .TXT files because six expert models and one expert-averaged model were each validated against four independent validation data sets. For further detail about spatial analysis and validation methods and assumptions please consult the accompanying publication Froese et al. (2017).SIdata.zip