Global Potential Vegetation Dataset

Navin Ramankutty and Jonathan Foley from the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), part of the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, have developed a map of global potential vegetation types. The map was derived at a 5 min resolution and contains natural vegetation classified into 15 types. This data set is derived mainly from the DISCover land cover data set, with the regions dominated by land use filled using the vegetation data set of Haxeltine and Prentice (1996). The data set represents the world's potential vegetation (i.e., vegetation that would most likely exist now in the absence of human activities) and not necessarily natural pre-settlement vegetation. This is because human activities such as fire suppression have modified the stages of succession at which vegetation communities exist. The data are available in two formats -- NetCDF and ArcINFO ASCII, 5min and 0.5 degree resolution. For NetCDF downloads, the data are available in NetCDF format at 5 min resolution and 0.5 degree resolution in latitude x longitude. See http://www.sage.wisc.edu/pages/datamodels.html for source directory contents.