In our paper ‘Impacts of existing and planned roads on terrestrial mammal habitat in New Guinea’ we estimated the Equivalent Connected Area (ECA) of habitat for 139 terrestrial mammal species with >90% of their habitat area in New Guinea. We calculated the ECA in three different situations: (1) no roads (baseline situation), (2) existing roads (current situation), and (3) existing and planned roads (future situation). We then quantified the habitat fragmentation effects of roads for each species by comparing the ECA in situations 2 and 3 to the ECA in situation 1. On average across the species, the ECA in the current situation equals 89% (SD = 12%) of the baseline ECA values (i.e., a situation without roads) and the lowest remaining ECA was found for Shawmayer’s coccymys (Coccymys shawmayeri, 53%). The average remaining ECA decreases to 71% (SD = 20%) of the baseline ECA values in the future situation. Further, the future remaining ECA drops to below 50% of the baseline for 28 species and the lowest remaining ECA was found for the montane soft-furred paramelomys (Paramelomys mollis, 36%). In this repository we publish the following data that were used to perform the analyses:• Roads_new_Guinea: shapefile with the existing and planned roads in New Guinea. These road data were either obtained from the Global Roads Inventory Project (GRIP) database (Meijer et al., 2018) or digitized from the maps published by Alamgir et al. (2019) and Sloan et al. (2019). Attribute data for each road includes an unique road identity number, road type, road surface, road width, and whether the road is an existing road or planned road.• Refined_range_[species_name]: species-specific raster files (.tif) in WGS84 projection at ~100m resolution indicating whether a grid cell is part of the refined species range (= 1).• Trait_data_and_results: Excelsheet with species-specific trait data, road crossing probabilities, and ECA values.ReferencesAlamgir M., Sloan S., Campbell M.J., Engert J., Kiele R., Porolak G., Mutton T., Brenier A., Ibisch P.L., Laurance W.F. (2019) Infrastructure expansion challenges sustainable development in Papua New Guinea. Plos One, 14, 20.Meijer J.R., Huijbregts M.A.J., Schotten K., Schipper A.M. (2018) Global patterns of current and future road infrastructure. Environmental Research Letters, 13, 10.Sloan S., Campbell M.J., Alamgir M., Engert J., Ishida F.Y., Senn N., Huther J., Laurance W.F. (2019) Hidden challenges for conservation and development along the Trans-Papuan economic corridor. Environmental Science & Policy, 92, 98-106.
Date Submitted: 2023-08-21
