Geodiversity data for Europe at 1-km and 10-km resolutions

The European geodiversity data provides a novel perspective on the diversity of non-living nature over large spatial extents. These data describe geological, pedological, geomorphological, and hydrological diversity, including 78 different geofeatures. Geofeatures refer to individual features that each component of geodiversity (geology, pedology, geomorphology, and hydrology) consists of, such as soil types in the case of pedology. This standardized and accessible geodiversity dataset facilitates comparability for geodiversity research across Europe and can be used for multiple purposes, from studying geodiversity patterns to geodiversity–biodiversity relationship and more. Moreover, the methodology (described in Toivanen et al. 2024) establishes a grid-based approach for quantifying geodiversity, which is suitable for large extents and can be applied in other regions worldwide.

This grid-based geodiversity dataset, available at resolutions of 1-km and 10-km, includes ready-to-use georichness variables (as GEOtiff files), and provides information on the presence and coverage of individual geofeatures that can be used to calculate different measures of geodiversity (as csv files). The data on georichness can be utilized in its entirety, representing the overall geodiversity, or with selected geodiversity components as individual richness layers describing geological, pedological, geomorphological or hydrological feature richness. One key objective of this geodiversity data is to provide complimentary environmental variables for biodiversity modelling and conservation studies. However, the choice of geodiversity data (richness or other index), the scale of analysis (1-km or 10-km), and the specific variables (overall geodiversity or individual components) should be determined by the research question and context.

This is a dataset from: Toivanen, M. et al. (2024). Geodiversity data for Europe. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. https://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2023.0173 (accepted for publication 2023-10-19)

Methods
We used global and continental open-access data as the basis of our European geodiversity data to describe geological (IHME1500 Lithology), pedological (SoilGrids 2.0), geomorphological (Geomorpho90m), and hydrological (EU-Hydro, Corine Land Cover 2018, IHME1500 Aquifer-type) diversity. EEA Reference Grids were used as the basis of our calculations to produce the raster layers of terrestrial geodiversity at two resolutions (1-km and 10-km) through zonal calculations. All analyses were done with ESRI ArcGIS Pro version 2.8.

The spatial extent of the data follows Corine Land Cover 2018 landcover data produced by the European Environment Agency (EEA).

Please see the related manuscript (Toivanen et al. 2024) for detailed description of the methodology.