Climate change is predicted to have substantial negative impacts on biodiversity for a wide variety of taxa across many regions of the world. Identifying the migration routes of species between the different habitats is essential for development of conservation strategies at landscape scale. Maintaining connectivity in the short to medium-term, provides possibility of dispersal, access to suitable habitats, seasonal migration and dynamics of the metapopulations, and in the long-term, ensure connectivity between appropriate habitat patches to support movements in response to climate change. In Iran, conservation and management of wildlife populations have mostly relied on protection of areas where the species of interest occurs, and little effort has been allocated to ensuring connectivity between appropriate habitat patches to support seasonal movements. In this study, we identified and evaluated migration corridors for vulnerable ungulate species, wild sheep ( Ovis orientalis ) between Haftad Gholleh protected area in Markazi Province, and Mooteh wildlife refuge in Isfahan Province as a conservation strategy in the face of climate change. For modelling the habitat suitability of study area, the MaxEnt model and Biomod2 Package were applied. Both bioclimatic variables and topographic variables and 8 modeling approaches (GLM, GAM, GBM, MARS, RF, SRE, MAXENT, FDA (were used. These models were applied to predict the potential changes in habitat suitability based on future climate scenarios A1B, A2, B1 from a commonly GCM model (HadCM3) for 2030. The results showed that Precipitation of Wettest Month (BIO13 ), and Annual Mean Temperature (BIO1) have the most contribution in modlling habitat suitability of this species. Then, outputs of MaxEnt and Biomod2 Package species distribution models were used to identify connectivity with electrical circuit model (Circuitscape Theory). The results showed that maximum connectivity (lowest resistance) is most pronounced only in one rout, however near Haftad Ghole protected area, there are several high current paths with the highest habitat suitability. The results of comparing different models, revealed that Biomod2 Models in lack of of presence data has better ability to identify habitat suitability comparing MaxEnt, and Circuit theory has great potential for identifying connectivity routes for conservation planning.
