Native range estimates for red-listed vascular plants

Besides being central for understanding both global biodiversity patterns
and associated anthropogenic impacts, species range maps are currently
only available for a small subset of global biodiversity. Here, we provide
a set of assembled spatial data for terrestrial vascular plants listed at
the global IUCN red list. The dataset consists of pre-defined native
regions for 47,675 species, density of available native occurrence records
for 30,906 species, and standardized, large-scale Maxent predictions for
27,208 species, highlighting environmentally suitable areas within
species’ native regions. The data was generated in an automated approach
consisting of data scraping and filtering, variable selection, model
calibration and model selection. Generated Maxent predictions were
validated by comparing a subset to available expert-drawn range maps from
IUCN (n = 4,257), as well as by qualitatively inspecting predictions for
randomly selected species. We expect this data to serve as a substitute
whenever expert-drawn species range maps are not available for conducting
large-scale analyses on biodiversity patterns and associated anthropogenic
impacts.