Sprague's Pipit habitat and corridors

Discipline: Habitat suitability modelling
Tools: ArcGIS
Methods: land cover classification, slope exclusion, occurrence sampling, habitat suitability modelling, corridor mapping
Data: Save Our Spragues Pipits; Manitoba Bird Breeding Atlas; Manitoba Land Initiative

Notes on method

Sprague’s Pipit nests in native grassland, which in southern Manitoba is mostly gone, converted, or fragmented into pieces too small to hold a breeding territory. Modelling where the bird can live is therefore less about finding good habitat than about finding the remnants and asking whether they connect.

Land cover came from satellite imagery, classified into the categories the species actually responds to rather than the categories the source data shipped with. Elevation and slope from LiDAR excluded terrain the bird does not use. Occurrence records sampled from atlas and volunteer survey data anchored the model to places the species has actually been seen.

Volunteer-identified priority areas are kept as their own layer rather than merged into the suitability score. They are observations, not model output, and combining the two would make it impossible to tell afterwards which areas the model found and which it was told.

Habitat suitability map classifying land cover into agriculture, forage crops, grassland, deciduous and mixedwood forest, marsh and water, with priority areas and protected areas overlaid and volunteer-identified priority areas distinguished from modelled ones. — Land cover drives the model; protected areas, First Nation areas and volunteer-identified priority areas are carried as separate layers rather than folded into the score.Base data: Save Our Sprague's Pipits, Manitoba Bird Breeding Atlas, Manitoba Land InitiativeOpen larger (2432px)