Protected Areas Grasslands and Savannas Latin America

Protected Areas (PAs) are important for maintaining ecosystem functioning and for harboring habitat for biodiversity, key aspects of these conservation strategies, especially for threatened and degraded ecosystems such as grasslands and savannas in Latin American landscapes. This study was developed for three lowland Latin American regions: the Casanare department in Colombia, the flooding Pampa in Argentina, and the ecoregions of Humid Chaco, Pantanal, Aquidabán, Litoral Central, and Selva Central in Paraguay. The data published here are summary tables of multitemporal averages of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) for trend comparisons between vegetation activity in grasslands inside and outside PAs across these three Latin American countries. This information was processed and exported from Google Earth Engine (GEE) using the MODIS/Terra Vegetation Indices 16-Day Global 250m product (MOD13Q1, Version 6.1; Didan, 2021), which is publicly available via https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/MODIS_061_MOD13Q1. Alongside this, there is a series of rasters of predicted species richness developed from Species Distribution Models (SDMs) for plants and birds in the study areas. Notably, based on this information, PAs show higher predicted plant and bird richness than in unprotected areas. The information in the predicted richness raster's pixels represents the number of species that could coexist in each pixel, making it valuable for future efforts to understand potential biodiversity distribution under different scenarios. The data on bird and plant occurrences that were downloaded from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and used for SDMs training are also available, along with the R scripts and Python code used to run the analysis in GEE via Google Colab.