TORABIAN S., SAFIANIAN A., FAKHERAN S., ASGARIAN A., AKBARI H., SENN J., Spatial Information Research , ۲۰۱۷.

Abstract: AbstractOne of the primary reason of species extinctionespecially rare species with very specific requirements, ishabitat destruction. To protect these species, habitat suit-ability evaluation plays a central role. Hence, an attempt ismade in this study to evaluate the suitability of sand cat’shabitat in a sand dune-dominated landscape in Iran. FourLandsat-derived indices including Normalized DifferenceVegetation Index (NDVI), Weighted Difference Vegeta-tion Index, Brightness Index (BI) and Salinity Index werecombined to characterize sand cat’s habitat requirementsthrough a land use land cover (LULC) map. Furthermore, aset of landscape metrics were employed to explore thespatial pattern LULC classes. Sand cat’s habitat suitabilitymap was generated by linear combination of the stan-dardized and relatively weighted NDVI and BI indices andthen categorized into five classes of most suitable, highlysuitable, moderately suitable, least suitable and not suit-able. The results showed that about 75% of the total area issuitable for sand cat. Although this region is rich in bio-diversity, it has not yet been subject to any conservationplanning and should be granted more conservationattentions.