Hello!
I have a few questions about the habitat quality model: I intend to use this tool in my thesis to model changes in habitat (in three cities in the Amazon) caused by climate change.
Considering my threats are temperature and precipitation, how would the raster for them be?
In the threats table, how would I assign a distance for climate change (MAX_DIST)?
Still in the threats table, if I choose to model only one threat, like temperature, what happens to the weight column?
Is it possible to apply the model to understand what happens to overall biodiversity, considering changes in these threats for each LULC, without specifying about species?
Thank you, looking forward to hearing from someone.
Ana
It is possible that the Habitat Quality model is not the right tool for this job. To the best of my knowledge, this model was not designed to analyze impacts of climate change. It expects habitat to be associated with specific landuse/landcover types, and it expects the threats to be located in discrete areas where they will impact the landscape. So it was designed to analyze impacts of landuse change or of some activity occurring on the landscape.
Perhaps something like species distribution modeling, or niche modeling, would be more appropriate for assessing how climate change would impact a certain species, or a functional group of species.