Abstract
•The model was assessed through a case study of East Dongting Lake, Middle China.•A new method to determine the weight of the environmental variables was proposed.•Water area and reed area were shown to play important roles on the Anatidae habitat suitability.•The assessment results by new model have strong discriminant power for species habitat suitability.
Habitat suitability assessment is one of the essential steps in habitat conservation and restoration. A weight method, which used the length of arrow in the result of canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) to determine the weight of the environmental variables, was developed to evaluate the Anatidae habitat suitability in East Dongting Lake. Based on descriptive waterfowl statistics from field observation data, Anatidae were selected as the representative waterfowl by the dominance. And then five environmental variables were identified by the correlation analysis as having important effects on the presence/absence of Anatidae habitat suitability. The Anatidae habitat suitability was evaluated by the new weight method. The results showed that the area of highly suitable habitat and moderately suitable habitat were 21.8% and 48.5%, respectively. Only small area was unsuitable habitat (9.3%). The survey data of Anatidae from 2006 to 2011 in East Dongting Lake were used to test the validity of the assessment results. It was concluded that the five environmental variables could well explain the results of Anatidae habitat suitability. The weight method based on CCA was feasible in assessment of Anatidae habitat suitability.