Data from: Developing spatially explicit and stochastic measures of ecological departure

Background: Ecological departure is a metric applied to mapped ecological
systems measuring dissimilarity between the distributions of observed and
expected proportions of non-stochastic reference vegetation classes within
an area. Aims: We created spatially explicit measures of ecological
departure incorporating stochasticity for each ecological system and all
ecological systems from a central Nevada USA landscape. Methods: Spatially
explicit ecological departures were estimated from a radius from each
pixel governed by a distance-decay function within a moving window.
Variability was introduced by simulating replicate climate time series for
each spatial reference condition and calculating departure per replicate.
Key results: Single system spatial ecological departure was highly and
extensively departed, except for one area of low-elevation
groundwater-dependent systems. Variance of spatial ecological departure
was extensively low, except in areas of lower ecological departure,
despite vegetation differences among replicates. The multiple-system
ecological departure exhibited lower ecological departure. Conclusions:
Spatial ecological departure was warranted for efficient land management
as results were concordant between non-spatial and spatial metrics;
however, rapid coding languages will be required.