Louisiana Pine Snake Potential Habitat

Wagner. R.O., J.B. Pierce, D.C. Rudolph, R.R. Schaefer, and D.A. Hightower. 2014. Modeling Louisiana Pine Snake (Pituophis ruthveni) Habitat Use in Relation to Soils. Proceedings of the 5th Big Thicket Science Conference: Changing Landscapes and Changing Climate. Southeastern Naturalist 13(Special Issue 5):146–158.

Layer values should be interpreted as follows: 1 indicates use is proportionate to availability, >1 indicates selection, and <1 indicates that the resource is used less than available. The layer file LPSpotHab.lyr contains the recommended symbology for display and interpretation. This layer was developed using data from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database. For the county/parish, soils polygons (identified by mukey) were dissolved within hydrologic group classes (hydgrp, component table). Note that hydgrp was not unique to soil type (mukey), and the hydgrp of the soil type's dominant component (maximum comppct_r, component table) was used. 

The original data were downloaded from URL:http://SoilDataMart.nrcs.usda.gov/, identified as follows: 

Our File Name SSURGO files (Publication Date)LPSpotHab_LA1 soilmu_a_la011 (20070412), soilmu_a_la043 (20080908), soilmu_a_la079 (20070413), soilmu_a_la115 (20070413)LPSpotHab_LA2 soilmu_a_la069 (20070615), soilmu_a_la085 (20070702), soilmu_a_la127 (20080925)LPSpotHab_LA3 soilmu_a_la013 (20070412), soilmu_a_la049 (20070412)LPSpotHab_TX1 soilmu_a_tx005 (20070102), soilmu_a_tx119 (20070103), soilmu_a_tx611 (20070103), soilmu_a_tx347 (20090212), soilmu_a_tx617 (20070103), soilmu_a_tx619 (20070914), soilmu_a_tx455 (20070102)LPSpotHab_TX2 soilmu_a_tx073 (20070102), soilmu_a_tx225 (20070103), soilmu_a_tx423 (20070102), soilmu_a_tx457 (20070102), soilmu_a_tx499 (20070103)

All counties/parishes for which layers were developed are within the snake's known historic range, with the exception of Grant and Winn Parishes, which were included to provide coverage of the Winn and Catahoula Ranger Districts (Walker, Montgomery, Calcasieu and Jefferson Davis, were not included as it has recently been determined that their inclusion in the historic range was based on records that are most likely not LPS). "Potential habitat" is defined as habitat that has the necessary edaphic and climatic conditions to support LPS but may or may not currently have suitable land use or vegetative conditions. Within the LPS historic range, climate is relatively uniform, and thus the soil conditions (a resource) selected by LPS were modeled using Resource Selection Functions (RSF).