Prepared species distributions

Raster layers representing 31 species/population distributions that were prepared for: Johnson, C.A., Drever, R., Kirby, P. Neave, E. and Martin, A. E. Protecting boreal caribou habitat can help conserve biodiversity and safeguard large quantities of soil carbon in Canada See <strong>Read_me.pdf</strong> for full description. These prepared distributions were later combined with select distributions from the ‘Range map extents, species at risk, Canada’ dataset (ECCC, 2016) to estimate species richness, taxonomic diversity, and presence of species considered to be unique to the boreal caribou distribution. Most of the prepared distributions, provided here, were based on georeferencing maps/figures in status reports and hand digitizing the distribution. Others are based on assembling National Hydro Network work units to re-create distributions in status reports. Some distributions are based on convex hull generation around map features, similar to extent of occurrence boundaries. For hand digitized distributions, rather than tracing all shorelines, islands, administrative boundaries, or other features, some supplementary layers from the Atlas of Canada data sets were used (see Read_me.pdf: ‘Supporting layers, used in species distribution preparation’ section for layers used). <strong>NOTE</strong>: These distributions are not official representations of any given species or population. Many were heavily generalized in the source maps. Additional spatial error was introduced during map georeferencing and digitizing. <br> <br>