Data for: Planning for a future of changes: prioritizing areas for conservation of small mammals in the Caatinga, Brazil

Human land use and climate change are two of the main threats affecting biodiversity, especially in arid/semiarid regions. The most effective way to protect the species in these ecosystems against these threats is through the delimitation of Protected Areas (PAs). However, such PAs need to be targeted cost-efficiently and consider future climate change. We identify priority areas to preserve small mammal species in the Caatinga in the present and in the future of climate change. We also evaluate how well these priority areas are protected by current PAs and identify ways forward to improve their protection. We use ecological niche models and Zonation spatial prioritisation software to identify the top 30% priority areas to preserve small mammal species under current climate and land use scenarios, besides considering optimistic and pessimistic scenarios of future climate change. We also evaluate how much these priority areas are covered by current PAs, identify ways to further improve t..., , , # Data for: Planning for a future of changes: prioritizing areas for conservation of small mammals in the Caatinga, Brazil

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2jm63xsxh](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2jm63xsxh)

Species occurrence point used in Ecological Niche Models from the article \"**Planning for a future of changes: prioritizing areas for conservation of small mammals in the Caatinga, Brazil**\", accepted in Diversity and Distributions.

## Description of the data and file structure

This database consists of a CSV file containing 3 columns. The first column corresponds to the names of the species analyzed, and the following to the decimal geographic coordinates (latitude, longitude, WGS84)

## Sharing/Access information

Please cite the article and this dataset when using this data.