Land cover derived terrestrial habitat change map for South Africa (1990-2018)

The primary building blocks of the map were the 1990, 2013/4 and 2018 national land cover products developed by GEOTERRAIMAGE (GTI) between 2015 and 2019. These products were reclassified and combined into a simple land cover change map, and then refined using additional input data on historical field crop boundaries and artificial waterbodies. Land cover information for Lesotho and Swaziland (not included in the national land cover data sets) was added to the layer using the European Space Agency's Beta Africa Land Cover product (2016) . The coastal areas of the map were reclassified using a detailed mask of the coastal zone developed by Harris et al. (2019). An earlier version of this map that excluded the 2018 time point (v5.1) was used in the terrestrial ecosystem assessments undertaken as part of the National Biodiversity Assessment 2018 (Skowno et al. 2019).