In this research we tried to assess the suitability of public access and field-recorded environmental data for modelling centipede distribution. We focused on the centipede assemblages of the Gorjanci hill range where four sampling sites were selected. Our research represents the first systematic survey of centipede assemblages in this part of Slovenia. Using the quadrant sampling method we collected 39 samples consisting of 656 individuals assigned to 31 species. For each sampling site, 11 environmental factors (describing geographical region, climate characteristics, soil properties, forest age and structure) were collected. The corresponding data was gathered from publicly available databases of the environmental management institutions of the Republic of Slovenia. We tried to evaluate the usefulness of this data, for species distribution modelling by comparing the results of redundancy analysis (RDA) based on the two different datasets: (i) one consisting of the data gathered from different databases and (ii) the other consisting of the data collected on the field. For the selection of environmental variables that were included in the final model we used automatic stepwise model building methods. So the final model includes environmental variables that describe elevation, soil organic matter content and thickness of leaf litter. The amount of variance of different centipede species distribution explained by environmental factors is relatively low which could indicate that our analysis lacks some environmental or other factors that would clearly describe centipede distribution within our study area. Another reason for our uncertian results is also a small sample size that was included in the analysis. Nevertheless, we can highlight that in the case of our study, field collected data proved to be more accurate for developing such models. One of the reasons for this could be the spatial scale in which publicly avalible environmetal data is collected. Such data is meant to be used for analisys made in the same spatial scale as the data was collected in, which is not the case in our study. Our results also suggest that environmental factors which potentially influence the centipede presence and distribution are species specific.
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