Attributed North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) 5km x 5km Master Sample and Grid-Based Sampling Frame

This data release contains the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) Master Sampling Grid at the 5 km x 5 km scale with biologically relevant covariates for NABat analyses attributed to each cell of the 5 km x 5 km grid frame for the continental United States. It was created using ArcPro and the 'sf', 'tidyverse', 'dplyr' and 'exactextractr' packages in R to extract covariates from multiple data sources following the 10 km x 10 km attributed grid process as well as adding additional covariates. These covariates include the habitat characteristics such as percent of wetlands, forest, deciduous and coniferous forest, dominant and subdominant oak types, the number of tree and oak species, topographic features such as physiographic diversity, elevation, and the presence of karst terrain features or water feature, climate variables such as mean temperature and precipitation, and subterranean human structures such as the number and length of culverts. This layer provides the predictive covariates used in the integrated species distribution model for tricolored bats (Perimyotis subflavus, see External Related Resources). The attributed grid can also support future modeling efforts and data visualizations.