The quality of animal habitats estimated from track activity and remote sensing data

A method is proposed for estimating the quality of animal habitats from field counts with positioning routes and tracks by means of GPS, multichannel Landsat data, digital elevation model, and discriminant analysis. The distribution of American and European minks is analyzed to demonstrate the principle of choosing an optimal method for analyzing the environmental characteristics that determine the distribution of species and for mapping and estimating the quality of habitats and the probability of track detection. The outlook and some problems of implementation of the proposed approach are discussed.