Freshwater Habitat Environmental Predictor Layers for Waterbodies and Streams across the Contiguous United States

This dataset contains raster layers for environmental characteristics for freshwater habitats including waterbodies (standing water including lakes and wetlands) and streams (moving water) for the contiguous United States. These data can be used to model habitat suitability of non-native species in the contiguous United States. Habitat predictors were developed in four suites: current waterbodies, current stream, future waterbodies, and future stream. A total of 44 predictor layers were compiled representing current conditions that represent environmental characteristics associated with habitat suitability of invasive aquatic species, such as climate, land-use, soil properties, topographic characteristics, and hydrologic flow. Predictor layers representing potential future conditions included single scenario predictions for land-use (2050) and hydrologic flow (2030 - 2059) variables as well as climate scenarios (CMIP6) which consist of five global circulation models of the shared socioeconomic pathway 370 (SSP370) from present to mid-century (2011 - 2040) that are included as part of the CHELSA (Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas) dataset. All layers were produced as geotiff raster files at an approximately 100 meter spatial resolution. We also include the R code we used to produce these data from their publicly available data sources.

This data release specifically includes the waterbody template raster, stream template raster, child items for waterbody_current, waterbody_future, stream_current, and stream_future, and R code (r-code.zip).