Description
The endangered Guizhou snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus Brelichi) is endemic to the northeast region of Guizhou in China, and serves as the flagship species of the Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve. Much has been published about their behavior and ecology, but their movements are not as well-understood, let alone modeled. The purpose of this study is to model the impact of human settlement and resource collection activities on local Guizhou snub-nosed monkey population dynamics and movement patterns near the critical Yangaoping region, then compare the agent-based model’s results with known observations and a Maxent analysis. A population-structure-based submodel also successfully emulated the results of a field study by Yang, Lei & Yang (2002). A point-density map was generated from the movement submodel outputs, and Cohen’s Kappa was calculated between the “with humans” and “without humans” scenarios. Our results show that human settlements and resource gathering activites near the Yangaoping region affected Guizhou snub-nosed monkey movements in a statistically significant manner. An attempt to validate this result by calculating the Kappa statistic between the movement model point density map and an approximated Maxent output point density map gave less conclusive results. Furthermore, for the population submodel, further scenarios can be applied to investigate the impacts of various potential threats to monkey population.
