Suitable Habitat Prediction for African Wild Ass (Equus africanus) in the Danakil Desert of Afar Region, Ethiopia

The Critically Endangered African wild ass are found in low population densities and there may be as few as 600 individuals in the Danakil Desert of Ethiopia and Eritrea. An understanding of suitable habitats is important for prioritizing the African wild ass conservation and management. In this study, maximum entropy (Maxent) modeling using African wild ass presence location data collected and separately prepared covariates to determine suitable habitat. The sample size (116 and 87) was determined by the number of occurrence points after removing duplicates for dry and wet seasons, respectively. The predicted moderately suitable habitat area extent was greater during the wet season (15,223 km2) than during the dry season (6,052 km2). Precipitation, temperature and distance from water sources were vital variables for the wet season while distance from water sources and distance from the settlements were important determinant covariates for the dry season. Model performances were high, with the area under the curve (AUC) values of 0.927 and 0.950 for wet and dry seasons, respectively. This information prioritizes where protected areas should be established for African wild ass conservation and also indicates potential new undocumented locations to guide surveys in the Danakil Desert of Afar Region, Ethiopia.