Long-term bimonthly spectral diversity reveals vulnerable refugia and convergent trajectories of forests across Southern Himalaya

This dataset contains the raster layers and the analysis-ready tabular extract used in "Long-term bimonthly spectral diversity reveals vulnerable refugia and convergent trajectories of forests across Southern Himalaya". It comprises multi-annual rasters of biodiversity (Rao's Q), vegetation condition (VCI/TCI/VHI), hydroclimatic variables (precipitation, soil moisture, distance to water), static topographic and edaphic covariates, GEDI structure metrics, and Getis-Ord Gi* spatial hotspot results, plus a single analysis-ready Parquet table built by pixel-wise stacking of all layers and a table of plant species richness and Shannon diversity per grid cell. Parquet Dataset Info Variables Attribute Description Spatial Coverage Koshi River Basin (Forest Communities) Temporal Coverage 1997–2024 (28 years) Format Apache Parquet (Snappy-compressed) Category Variables Years Spectral Diversity Rao's Q All Months (rao_q_bimonthly_{year}), Rao's Q Positive (rao_q_pos_{year}) 1997–2024 Drought indices TCI (tci_{year}), VCI (vci_{year}), VHI (vhi_{year}) 1997–2024 Hydrological Water Distance (water_distance_{year}), Precipitation (precipitation_{year}), Soil Moisture (soil_moisture_{year}) 1997–2024 *Water Distance (1997–2021) Terrain DEM (dem), Slope (slope), Aspect (aspect), Hillshade (hillshade) Static Soil properties (0–30 cm) Bulk Density (bdod), CEC (cec), Clay (clay), Nitrogen (nitrogen), pH H₂O (phh2o), Sand (sand), Silt (silt), Soil Organic Carbon (soc) Static Spatial identifiers longitude, latitude, pixel_id Static