Abstract:Species distribution model has become an important tool to study the species distribution at large-scale in the context of global change due to the development and improvement of statistical models and spatial information data. Plateau Pika (Ochotona curzoniae) is a keystone species in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and plays an important role in the entire ecosystem. The Qinghai Lake Basin is located in the northeast of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and is a typical closed inland basin with a watershed area of approximately 29 661 km2 that (Fig. 1). This research aimed to model the distribution of Plateau Pika in the Qinghai Lake Basin using seven models from BIOMOD package in R with occurrence data and environmental variables. AUC (area under the curve) and TSS (true skill statistic) based on confusion matrix (Table 1) were chosen to evaluate the performance of different models. The results showed that the Plateau Pika mainly distributed in the west and north bank of Qinghai Lake, around Tianjun county and in the upstream of the Buha River (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4). The most important environmental factors affecting the distribution of Plateau Pika were the distance to road and, to the settlement of people, the air temperature of the warmest month, the NDVI standard deviation, and the precipitation of the coldest and driest season (Table 2). The Boost Regression Tree model (GBM) and Maximum Entropy model (MAXENT) make the best predictions, while the Generalized Linear Model (GLM) gives a poor result (Fig. 2). The optimized result shows that the integration and selection of can improve the accuracy and performance of the model effectively (Fig. 5 and Fig. 6).