Global Land-use and Land-cover rasters under past, current, future climatic conditions in usable format for ecologists, links to files

DOI

Land-Use Land-cover (LULC) data are important predictors of species occurrence and threat. Although there are LULC available for ecologists under current conditions, there is a lack of such data under past and future climatic conditions. This hinders the use, for example, of LULC in Ecological Niche Modeling which projects species distribution under different time periods. The Land Use Harmonization Project (LUH2, http://luh.umd.edu/data.shtml) provides massive data from 850 to 2100 with 0.25 x 0.25 degree spatial resolution covering continental areas, but in a format (NetCDF) most ecologists cannot use. Here we selected the most useful data for ecologists and transformed them into GIS file formats regularly used in macroecology and ecological niche modelling. Main types of variables included twelve possible land use and land cover states: forested primary land (primf), non-forested primary land (primn), potentially forested secondary land (secdf), potentially non-forested secondary land (secdn), managed pasture (pastr), rangeland (range), urban land (urban), C3 annual crops (c3ann), C3 perennial crops (c3per), C4 annual crops (c4ann), C4 perennial crops (c4per), C3 nitrogen-fixing crops (c3nfx). We provide two data files in TIF format for each year: separate files for each of these states (continuous values), and a single file with all states combined (categorical data). To create the latter we assigned pixel membership to the state with the highest value among the 12 files. Time period covered thirty-seven years from year 900 to 2100. With a grain of 100 years from 900 to 1950, every 10 years from 1950 to 2010, and every five years from 2010 to 2100. From 2015 on the data are provided under two representative concentratios pathways (of greenhouse gases): RCP 4.5 and 8.5.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.892201
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.892201
Provenance
Creator Vale, Mariana Moncassim; Rocha, Tainá Carreira ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2018
Rights Licensing unknown: Please contact principal investigator/authors to gain access and request licensing terms; Data access is restricted (moratorium, sensitive data, license constraints)
OpenAccess false
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 52 data points
Discipline Earth System Research