Habitat suitability and environmental covariates for the New Mexico ridge-nosed rattlesnake (Crotalus willardi obscurus)

This data release contains the spatial raster outputs from analyses of habitat suitability of the New Mexico ridge-nosed rattlesnake (NMRR), Crotalus willardi obscurus. This species is one of five recognized of the ridge-nosed rattlesnakes and was federally listed as threatened in 1978 due primarily to perceived threats of over collection and a very narrowly restricted range. This range is now known to include only three isolated populations: the Animas Mountains of New Mexico, the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico and Arizona, and the Sierra San Luis Mountains in Mexico. Included here are spatial data: 1) the mean habitat suitability (expressed as a numerical value from 0 to 100), 2) the study area boundary used to model habitat, and 3) the environmental covariates used to model habitat. We developed an ensemble weighted habitat suitability model to create predictions of habitat potential across each of the three sky island mountain complexes using habitat suitability modeling (HSM), a quantitative modeling approach that relates locations of species observations to environmental covariates shown to influence or define habitat suitability (Franklin 2010). We used an ensemble approach with five algorithms with WISDM: Workbench for Integrated Species Distribution Modeling (version 2.5.0, Daniel et al. 2026) using a presence-background modeling approach. Presence-background modeling compares environmental conditions at locations where a species has been observed (in this case locations where snakes were captured by field crews) to environmental conditions across a study area (background). Background environmental conditions were represented with a suite of raster data hypothesized to influence habitat suitability. These raster data represented average conditions between the years 2021 and 2024 across the study area. Locations where NMRR have been observed were obtained from a long-term capture-recapture dataset of the entire snake community across the NMRR range that is the result of ongoing investment by a diverse group of 11 funding partners, including federal, state and private entities.

This data release includes:
1) 'landing_page_metadata.xml' (this file) which contains the project-level metadata.
2) 'habitat_suitability.zip' which contains the geotiff file with habitat suitability values, the shapefile used as the study area boundary and habitat_suitability_metadata.xml
3) 'covariates.zip' which contains the geotiff files used as environmental covariates for habitat suitability modeling and covariates_metadata.xml
4) 'model-info.zip' which contains text files and figures with information about model calibration and model-info_metadata.xml

Citations:
Daniel, C., Engelstad, P., Miller, B., and; Morisette, J. 2026. WISDM: Workbench for Integrated Species Distribution Modeling (Version 2.5.0) [Software package]. ApexRMS. Retrieved from WISDM Package GitHub:https://github.com/ApexRMS/wisdm/
Franklin J. Mapping Species Distributions: Spatial Inference and Prediction. Cambridge University Press; 2010.