Downscaled Projections of Bioclimatic Indices for Species Distribution Modelling in Australia (1975 - 2099)

<p>Climate change is a major factor contributing to biodiversity loss globally and in Australia. Addressing this conservation challenge requires information about present and future species distributions. To improve assessment of future species distributions, we have calculated 19 bioclimatic indices using dynamically and statistically downscaled Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) Global Climate Models (GCMs) over Australia at a 5 km resolution through 1975 – 2099 for three emissions scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0). We used the Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM) for dynamical downscaling to 10km, and the Quantile Matching for Extremes (QME) method for statistical downscaling the CCAM output to 5km. This dataset will be useful for the study of climate change impacts on species distributions in Australia.</p>