2.9 Grey wolf and golden jackal vehicle collisions
We obtained vehicle collision locations of grey wolf and golden jackal during 2013-2018 from the Markazi DOE. The road crossing data for grey wolf and golden jackal were obtained from a variety of sources including opportunistic direct observation and environmental guards (from 2013 and 2018).
2.10 Evaluating congruence between crossing points and predicted connectivity
We used a spatial randomization testing procedure to evaluate congruence between the locations where grey wolf and golden jackal were observed crossing the road and predict connectivity in each combination of the resistance surface and connectivity model (Cushman et al., 2014). Spatial randomization testing of this kind is recommended in cases where there is spatial dependence among observations and produces an unbiased estimate of the probability of the observed outcome given the data (Cushman et al., 2014).
We compared the median value of predicted connectivity for the 170 golden jackal and 101 grey wolf crossing locations with the distribution of median values of 1 × 107 random samples of 170 and 101 sites along the highway within the study area. For each combination of the resistance surface and connectivity modeling approach, we calculated the ranking of the median of observed values within the distribution of the medians of the 1 × 107 random samples.