The accelerating exposure of European protected areas to climate change

This dataset contains raster files that represent three climate change metrics at 1 km resolution (ETRS89 Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area (ETRS_LAEA) projection): local (gradient-based) climate velocity (Loarie et al. 2009); analogue (distance-based) climate velocity (Hamann et al. 2015; Brito-Morales et al. 2018) and climate change magnitude (Williams & Jackson 2007; Williams et al. 2007). The dataset covers a study area which comprehends the territories of EU 46 extended from Greenland in the west to the Urals in the east, including Turkey and parts of North African countries to cover the entire Mediterranean shoreline.

For each metric, we compiled climate change data based on nine combinations of three climate scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP3-7.0, SSP5-8.5) and three Earth System Models (ESMs): GFDL-ESM4, UKESM1-0-LL, and MPI-ESM1-2-HR. We used mean annual near-surface (2m) air-temperature (tas, bio1) and the annual precipitation rate (pr,bio12) to represent overall climatic risk. Climatic variables were retrieved from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017, 2021). Unit of measure of local and analog velocities is km/year, while magnitude is adimensional.

The dataset is divided into subfolders for each metric. Each folder contains results for each ESM and their ensemble results for each SSP-RCP scenario. For more information on the methodology and original data please see the paper entitled "The accelerating exposure of European protected areas to climate change" (Cimatti & Mezzanotte et al., 2025, Global Change Biology).This last version of the dataset holds an updated output of the analog velocity, as we significantly increased the search buffer around each focal cell to identify  a climate analog (from 500 km to 1500 km).We also provide example codes (to be repeated for each ESMs/SSPs) to reproduce the final outputs and results of the study (readme file can be found in the RCodes/SCRIPT GCB folder).