A Minimalist Approach to Mapping Species Habitat: Pearson's Planes of Closest Fit

Identification of probable use areas by animals is important for land-use planning, identification of conservation regions, and ecological studies of spatial distribution, movements, and resource use. Many statistical methods, often extensions of nonspatial resource selection models (e.g., Manly et al. 1993), increasingly are employed in geographical information systems (GIS) to dtermine the value of an index of use or likellihood of occurence of a species at each point or grid call within a study area based on the multivariate configuration of havitat variables at hose points. THe resulting maps then depict spatial variation in potential animal use, often at relatively fire resolution over large areas.