A global map of terrestrial habitat types

We provide a global spatially explicit characterization of 47 (version 001) terrestrial habitat types, as defined in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) habitat classification scheme, which is widely used in ecological analyses, including for assessing species’ Area of Habitat. We produced this novel habitat map by creating a global decision tree that intersects the best currently available global data on land cover, climate and land use. The maps broaden our understanding of habitats globally, assist in constructing area of habitat (AOH) refinements and are relevant for broad-scale ecological studies and future IUCN Red List assessments. We hope that these data and outlined framework will spur further development of biodiversity-relevant habitat maps at global scales. An interactive interface helping to navigate the map can be found at on the Naturemap website ( https://explorer.naturemap.earth/map).

Provided is the code to recreate the map (to made available soon), the global composite image at native -100m Copernicus resolution for level 1 and level 2 and layers of aggregated fractional cover (unit: [0-1] * 1000) at 1km for level 1 and level 2.

Starting with version 004 there changemasks for the years 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 are supplied. Changemasks for the composite masks show the changed grid cells and their new values with earlier years being nested in later years, e.g. using the changemask for 2019 includes all changes up to 2019. For the fractional cover estimates at ~1km resolution, new fractional cover changemasks are supplied as subtraction (before - after) between the previous and current year (unit range: [-1 to 1] * 1000).

We highlight that only changes in land cover are considered since most of the ancillary layers (e.g. pasture, forest management, climate, etc...) are static and thus not all changes in habitats can be found. We therefore recommend end users to continue using the 2015 dataset unless specific habitat updates to habitat are needed.

Citation:

Please cite the published paper and state the used version of the habitat map

Jung, M., Dahal, P.R., Butchart, S.H.M., Donald, P.F., De Lamo, X., Lesiv, M., Kapos, V., Rondinini, C., Visconti, P., (2020). A global map of terrestrial habitat types. Sci. Data 7, 256. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00599-8