Abstract:Information on the spatial temporal dynamics of wildlife habitat suitability is critical for conservation. Sichuan snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana) is a rare and precious primate endemic to China, living in temperate forests on mountains in Sichuan, Gansu, Shanxi and Hubei Province. Sichuan Tangjiahe National Nature Reserve is located in Minshan Mountains, which is one of the important distribution areas for Sichuan snub-nosed monkey. However, little is known about the spatial distribution of the habitat of Sichuan snub-nosed monkeys and its changes across different seasons in this area. Here, we generated seasonal distribution maps of habitat suitability of Sichuan snub-nosed monkeys in Sichuan Tangjiahe National Nature Reserve by integrating field data, remote sensing imagery, and the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model. Between 2017 and 2018, occurrence sites global position system(GPS)coordinates of Sichuan snub-nosed monkey were collected by line transect surveys and patrol data from Sichuan Tangjiahe National Nature Reserve, China. A total of 536 occurrence sites of Sichuan snub-nosed monkey were used in the habitat modeling, including 149 records in spring, 94 records in summer, 115 records in autumn and 178 records in winter. The environmental variables used in the modeling can be divided into three categories, including terrain factors (slope, aspect and elevation) extracted from the Digital Elevation Model (DEM), vegetation factor extracted from the Thematic Mapper, and other factors (road and water source) extracted from the 1: 50000 vector maps of Sichuan Tangjiahe National Nature Reserve. The assessment results of receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) show that the area under the curve (AUC) values of training data and test data in four seasons are more than 0.8, which indicates the habitat modeling results are good. We identified three main factors affecting the habitat distribution of Sichuan snub-nosed monkeys in different seasons, including altitude (accounting for 41.1% in spring, 34.4% in summer, 38.7% in autumn and 13.6% in winter), distance from the river (accounting for 33.3% in spring, 18.8% in summer, 12.9% in autumn and 40.2% in winter), and proximity to road (accounting for 5.9% in spring, 17% in summer, 32% in autumn and 30.9% in winter). There are seasonal variations in the suitable habitat area of Sichuan snub-nosed monkeys. In spring, the potential habitat area reaches its maximum of 233.94 km2, accounting for 58.48% of the nature reserve. It decreases to 192.75 km2 (48.19% of the reserves) in summer, 145.54 km2 (36.39%) in autumn, and reaches its minimum of 142.63 km2 (35.66%) in winter. The habitat distribution of Sichuan snub-nosed monkeys in the reserve exhibits obvious seasonal shift across different altitude ranges. In summer, the altitude of suitable habitat is within 1900 m to 2800m, but in the winter it is below 2400 m. The results highlight that it is important to protect the complete forest vegetation belts for the survival of Sichuan snub-nosed monkeys, and special attention should also be paid to the protection of the habitat of Sichuan snub-nosed monkeys at lower altitudes, where human disturbance is stronger in Sichuan Tangjiahe National Nature Reserve.