California Black Oak Habitat Suitability (Baseline), Golden Gate Biosphere Network

This habitat suitability model used 3247 presence and 4231 absence points collected between 1980 and 2023 from multiple sources, cleaned for accuracy and quality, and filtered to 1-km minimum nearest neighbor distance. The model calibration extent was limited to a 5-km buffer of the known species range within the California Floristic Province. The model has a spatial resolution of 270m and is based on historical (1921-2050) climate conditions and 15 predictors: summer precipitation, summer maximum temperature, winter minimum temperature, actual evapotranspiration, annual runoff, southwest index, solar insolation index, topographic wetness index, terrain ruggedness, soil thickness, soil pH, soil available water capacity, soil percent clay, soil percent sand, and soil porosity.

Model performance was evaluated with both threshold-independent and threshold dependent metrics, and the model-specific threshold maximizing the sum of sensitivity and specificity was used for calculating threshold-dependent model evaluation metrics. This model had an AUC of 0.87, sensitivity of 0.84, specificity of 0.78, TSS of 0.63, Jaccard index of 0.66, and Sorensen similarity index of 0.80.

Values below the maximum sum of sensitivity and specificity threshold (0.4212) were assigned a value of 0. A land cover mask was used in post processing to convert the suitability value of high intensity development, barren, cultivated crops, and open water (NLCD 2021) land covers to 0 and the output was clipped to the Golden Gate Biosphere Network terrestrial boundary.