Climate change modelling indicates extensive range contractions for a scarce southern African endemic and minimal protected area network within its future climatically suitable range

The Black Harrier (Circus maurus) is listed as Endangered by the IUCN and is an endemic, range-restricted habitat specialist within southern Africa. Our study aimed to assess the current and potential future changes in the distribution of the Black Harrier, as well as to quantify the most suitable areas within both the “breeding range” (i.e., areas used for nesting) and the “all-year-round range” (i.e., areas used by Black Harriers during breeding and non-breeding periods). Using tracking data of 13 tagged adults and 307 nest locations collected from 2000-2015, we implemented a Species Distribution Modelling workflow, making use of a data-driven process of variable selection and model optimization. Model optimization included hyper-parameter tuning, which is the process of finding the optimal settings for model parameters to improve predictive performance. Additionally, we used General Circulation Models and three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways to assess the potential impact of climate c..., , # Climate change modelling indicates extensive range contractions for a scarce southern African endemic and minimal protected area network within its future climatically suitable range

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.2jm63xt26](10.5061/dryad.2jm63xt26)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset contains occurrence records for the Endangered Black Harrier (*Circus maurus*) collected between 2014 and 2020, aggregated and spatially denatured in line with Category 2 biodiversity data protection protocols. Original point locality records were generalized to a spatial resolution of 10 km and converted to a raster (GeoTIFF) format representing species observation counts per 10 km grid cell. The dataset is provided in GeoTIFF format, which is commonly used for storing spatial data. The main data file and several auxiliary files are included:

| **Filename** | **Description** ...,