Detection of waterholes by Vegetation Index in the habitat of bighorn sheep (Ovis Canadensis) in Baja California
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Conservation Biology, Ecology
- Keywords
- watering hole, bighorn sheep, Landsat, NDVI
- Copyright
- © 2017 Escobar-Flores et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Detection of waterholes by Vegetation Index in the habitat of bighorn sheep (Ovis Canadensis) in Baja California. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2999v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2999v1
Abstract
The desert bighorn sheep is adapted to the extreme conditions of arid ecosystems. The amount and distribution of watering holes is an essential component of the habitat of this species. With information provided by people in Sierra Santa Isabel a database of potential sites watering sites was obtained, which was taken as reference of spectral information for water and vegetation. Two images of Landsat 8-OLI were processed; the first corresponded to the end of the drought and the second rainy season of 2013. A false-color composite was made between bands where water has an absorption behavior (band 5 and 7) and a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Field visits to the existence of 15 watering holes of which 11 had evidence of use by the bighorn were confirmed. The abundance of plant species Tamarix ramosissima, Juncus acutus, Typha domingensis and Psorathamnus spinosus contributed substantially NDVI values and facilitated the detection of watering holes.
Author Comment
This manuscript has not submitted in any peer review journal and conferences procedings