Global biogeographical regions reveal a signal of past human impacts

Ecologists have long documented that the world's biota is spatially organised in regions with boundaries shaped by processes acting on geological and evolutionary timescales. Although growing evidence suggests that historical human impact has been key in how biodiversity is currently assembled, its role as a driver of the geographical organisation of biodiversity remains unclear. Using non-volant terrestrial mammals, we set up a bioregionalization procedure focused on two data sets, one describing the current ranges of terrestrial mammals, and another describing their potential natural ranges in the absence of historic anthropogenic land use. We then quantified the relative importance of anthropogenic land use (5000 and 2000 years ago, and present time) to predict the current and natural biogeographical regions across the Earth. In general, past and present human land use were important predictors of current bioregions but did not largely contribute to predicting natural bioregions. Pas...,

This dataset has been collected from different publicly available databases. Most of the data has been processed in R and ArcGIS. 

, , # Global biogeographical regions reveal a signal of past human impacts

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvxcn](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvxcn)

## Description of the data and file structure

**1.- Current\_predictors.csv**: Contains latitude (LAT) and longitude (LON) info of each grid cell (ID) and the classification values of the two main biogeographical levels (*Medium\_bio, and Large\_bio*) calculated using current distribution ranges of terrestrial mammals (IUCN 2016 in PHYLACINE 1.2).
It also contains 11 environmental and human land use predictors:

* ***Diff\_elevat***: the difference between maximum and minimum elevation. **Continuous data**
* ***T\_season***: Temperature seasonality. **Continuous data**
* ***Pre\_season***: Precipitation seasonality. **Continuous data**
* ***HI5000BP***: human land use *5000 years ago.* **Continuous data**
* ***HI2000BP***: human land use *2000 years ago.* **Continuous data**
* ***HI2000\_current***: current human land use. **Continu...