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Abstract
In northeast Brazil in the state of Piau, bearded Capuchin monkeys (Cebus libidinosus) exhibit a very unique feeding behavior. They crack open palm nuts using specific stones as tools. Other than the great apes, they are the only monkeys known to use tools. Behavioral psychologists are studying the phenomenon at a local scale, but they also want to know where else in the region they may find the behavior in order to gain insight at a broader, landscape scale. Remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) techniques were used to characterize the habitat of tool use by monkeys and perform multiple logistic regression to develop a statistical model which predicts the location of the behavior. These GIS, remote sensing, and modeling methods are valuable to Brazilian resource management and investigations of Capuchin tool use behaviors. The independent variables are geospatial landscape data developed from Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection 2Radiometer (ASTER) satellite images. The resulting models were scrutinized using pseudo-R statistics, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), and prediction accuracy using independent data. The best models had prediction accuracies of site and non-site data of approximately 90 percent.