| dc.description.abstract | The Eastern Chimpanzees are medium – sized primates found in lowland and sub montane tropical forests, and forest galleries extending into savanna in East Africa that is Uganda, DRC, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania. Kibaale National Park (KNP) has the highest recorded population density of any forest surveyed in Uganda of the Eastern Chimpanzees. This species faces significant decline in population compounded by diminishing habitat quality. This study aimed to model the dynamics in the habitat range of chimpanzees in Kibaale National Park (KNP). The specific objectives were to i) characterize chimpanzee hotspots in the park, ii) simulate habitat suitability of the Park landscape for chimpanzees, and iii) assess the effect of climate change on habitat suitability changes in KNP for the year 2039. Accordingly, chimpanzee presence data were obtained from the Monitoring and Research Unit at Kibaale National Park. Characterization of chimpanzee hotspots utilized spatial autocorrelation and hotspot analyses in ArcGIS. Habitat suitability simulation employed maximum entropy modeling using several environmental variables including rainfall, minimum and maximum temperature, relative humidity, elevation, Euclidean distance from water sources and roads. To assess effects of climate change on changes in habitat suitability, future climate scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) for rainfall, temperature, and relative humidity in the Near-Term period were integrated to model prospective habitat changes. Hotspots were recorded overlapping with chimpanzee home ranges of Ngogo, Kanyanchu and Kanywara while the cold spots were observed around the Mainaro home range. In addition, habitat suitability was mapped, highly suitable areas covered 15.5%, moderately suitable covered 21.5%, marginally suitable covered 32.2% and unsuitable 30.8% of KNP. Minimum temperature and rainfall had the highest contribution to the model, distance to roads and elevation were the least contributing factors. For climate scenario analysis in 2030, RCP 4.5, and 8.5 revealed respective AUC values of 0.783 and 0.789. Maximum temperature was the highest contributing factor and distance to water sources had the least contribution to the models in both scenarios. Chimpanzee occurrences were more pronounced in areas with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index between 0.6 to 0.8, rainfall of 1300mm onwards, minimum temperature of 14.5°C and maximum temperature of 25.5°C, however, the chimpanzee range is likely to reduce by 3% under RCP 8.5. This study therefore, recommends that, the Uganda Wildlife Authority protects the already existing suitable areas and improves the less suitable areas to attain higher suitability. It also calls for further studies on the influence of temperature on chimpanzee behavior as this factor has the greatest contribution towards suitability. | en_US |
