Spatial and climatic worldwide database of the Asian Palmate Group of Araliaceae

Asian Palmante Group database (AsPGdb) is a cleaned database for the 23 genera of the Asian Palmate Group (AsPG) of the ginseng family Araliaceae. Data has been collected from March 2018 to April 2020, from multiple data sorces, mostly open access online databases, especially GBIF. 

Each record in the database contains descriptive information about the taxa and different variables related to the geographic location of each record. In addition, each record has climatic information according to the following classifications: latitudinal zonation, Köppen’s classification (Köppen and Geiger, 1936), Holdridge’s classification (Holdridge, 1996), Metzger’s classification (Metzger et al., 2012) and Ecoregions system (Olson et al., 2001). We developed climate layers of these bioclimatic classifications for use in Geographic Information Systems, either by modifying existing layers (Dinerstein et al., 2017; Beck et al., 2018) or by creating new ones (all layers are available in GitHub repository: https://github.com/vvalnun/Bioclimatic-classifications-AsPG.git. The complete description of the AsPG database is found in the file named "Supplementary material 1_Database description_V2". The file describes in detail the information found in each of the columns.

To compile the AsPGdb,  we clean invalid records, correct spatial uncertainty and extract climatic data for all the records of the AsPG database, using R (R Core Team, 2018) and QGIS (QGIS Development Team, 2021).

DOI references from GBIF downloads are provided in the "References_GBIF_AsPG" file.