Habitat Suitability Score Calculator

This calculator scores wildlife habitat quality by combining four 0-1 factors — food availability, water availability, cover quality, and disturbance level (inverted, since high disturbance means low suitability) — using a geometric mean rather than a simple average: HSI = (food × water × cover × (1 − disturbance))^(1/4). That choice matters a lot in practice. A geometric mean is unforgiving of a single weak factor in a way an arithmetic mean is not: if food scores 0.9 but water scores 0.1, the geometric mean collapses toward the weak link (roughly 0.42 in that example) instead of averaging out to a comfortable 0.5. This deliberately mirrors Liebig's Law of the Minimum — the ecological principle that a population is constrained by whichever resource is scarcest, not by the average of all resources — so a habitat with abundant food but no water reads as poor habitat, not mediocre habitat.

The calculator also reports the plain arithmetic mean alongside HSI specifically so you can see how much the geometric method is penalizing an unbalanced site. Beyond the composite score, the calculator identifies the single lowest-scoring factor as the "limiting factor" — the one to address first, since improving a factor that's already strong does little for overall suitability while raising the weakest one moves HSI the most. It also estimates "improvement potential": how much HSI would rise if that limiting factor were brought up to 0.8, giving a concrete restoration target. The carrying capacity multiplier equates HSI directly to a scaling factor against a baseline population density estimate — useful for back-of-envelope comparisons across sites, but the four input scores are themselves judgment calls or field-survey-derived values, so the model's precision only matches the consistency of those underlying 0-1 ratings.