Code, datacube and results for: Where explorers looked or where ore is? Null models, exploration-effort shortcuts and cross-country transfer in continental-scale prospectivity mapping of sediment-hosted Zn–Pb systems

This record contains the code, the rebuilt H3 datacube, out-of-fold predictions and result tables for the article “Where explorers looked or where ore is? Null models, exploration-effort shortcuts and cross-country transfer in continental-scale prospectivity mapping of sediment-hosted Zn–Pb systems” (submitted to Natural Resources Research). The datacube rebuilds the open datasets of the tri-national Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative (USGS, Geological Survey of Canada, Geoscience Australia) on 5,164,970 H3 level-7 cells covering the United States, Canada and Australia. It adds exploration-effort proxies (GRIP4 roads, GHS-POP 2020 population, density of other-commodity occurrences from MRDS and Geoscience Australia), labels for Mississippi Valley-type and clastic-dominated Zn–Pb systems, spatial-block identifiers and the published CMMI prospectivity scores. Files: - znpb_h3_datacube.parquet – evidential layers, effort proxies, labels and block identifiers per cell - znpb_oof_predictions_coarse_blocks.parquet – out-of-fold LightGBM predictions for coarse spatial-block cross-validation (uniform and target-group background) - code_and_results.zip – Python code, result tables (CSV) and figures - README.md – reproduction steps and data dictionary Code is released under the MIT licence; derived data under CC BY 4.0. Source data remain under their original licences (see README).