Ecological niche modeling for the Red-banded Snake (Lycodon rufozonatus)

A MaxEnt ecological niche modeling workflow in R to assess the habitat suitability of Red-banded snakes (Lycodon rufozonatus) in Jeju Island, Republic of Korea.

Software and package dependencies

• R (version 4.2.2)
• SDMtune (version 1.3.1)
• ENMeval (version 2.0.4)
• ecospat (version 4.0.0)
• spThin (version 0.2.0)
• MASS (version 7.3.58.2)
• ntbox (version 0.6.6.6)
• dplyr (version 1.1.0)
• raster (version 3.6.14)
• terra (version 1.7.65)
• rgdal (version 1.6.4)
• ggplot2 (version 3.4.1)
• rasterVis (version 0.51.5)
• extrafont (version 0.19)

Study background

• The Red-banded Snake (Lycodon rufozonatus) is a colubrid with broad geographic distribution across East and Southeast Asia.
• In the Republic of Korea (South Korea), this species is commonly found across the mainland as well as on some of the islands that are close to the mainland.
• However, this species was well-known to be absent from the largest island of the country: Jeju. This was established by more than three decades of field surveys across South Korea.
• In July 2021, we found a roadkill of L. rufozonatus while conducting field surveys in Seogwipo, Jeju Island.
• As it was unlikely that this specimen represented a previously unknown island population, we determined its potential geographic origin through phylogenetic analyses of the mitochondrial COI and Cytb genes.
• We then assessed the habitat suitability of L. rufozonatus in Jeju using ecological niche modeling. The code and dataset are provided here to reproduce the results of niche modeling.

Dataset

• The "occs.zip" file contains the raw and spatially rarefied occurrence points (15km thinning distance) of L. rufozoantus.
• The "bg.zip" file contains two sets of background points for MaxEnt modeling at two different spatial scales.
• The environmental data layers can be obtained and processed using the details provided in the paper (see below for citation).

Citation

A research article associated with this project is published in the journal Herpetologica.

Y Shin, K Heo, SN Othman, Y Jang, M-S Min, A Borzée. 2024. Tracing the geographic origin of a non native Red
banded Snake (Colubridae: Lycodon rufozonatus) found on Jeju Island, Republic of Korea. Herpetologica 80: 30-39.