Key source area to conserve brown bear Ursus arctos Linnaeus, 1758 in Alborz Mountain

The main goals of this research are predicting the suitable habitat distribution, identifying habitat selection of brown bear and the main effective factors in Central Alborz Protected Area on spring and summer when they have yearling cubs. Identifying core areas, as source populations, have a key role to conserve of the species. The results are showed as a predicted map of suitable habitat patches distribution and priority of influence factors, according to the species fundamental niche. The required data are a set of species occurrence coordinates (presence points) according to the field observations and study areas’ environmental parameters layers. In this study we used Maximum Entropy Model for habitat modeling in central Alborz protected area. The presence data were gather from field surveys. The AUC values is 0.89 indicating good performance of the model. Jackknife graph showed that annual precipitation is the most effective parameter and vegetation is the most individual parameter. The predicted habitat of species showed a seasonal pattern of distribution. This results can be used to manage and conserve species in suitable habitats according to the species response to the environmental factors.