NicheGrid v1.1: range-derived climatic niches of 45,547 species in a common climate space

NicheGrid v1.1 contains the range-derived climatic niches of 45,547 species of amphibians, birds, mammals, reptiles and plants, and of the introduced ranges of 594 species. All niches are estimated in one global climate space and on one lattice, so they can be compared directly across species and groups without re-gridding. Native and introduced ranges were taken from undissolved range polygons of the IUCN Red List (version 2025-2) and of BirdLife International and Handbook of the Birds of the World (version 2025.2), filtered by presence, origin and seasonality codes, and rasterised on a 20-km equal-area grid. The climate of every land cell (CHELSA V2.1, 1981-2010) was projected into a principal-component space defined by seven bioclimatic variables (bio1, bio2, bio3, bio4, bio13, bio14 and bio15) across all land cells. Each niche is a Gaussian kernel density on a common lattice in the space of the first two components, estimated with one cross-validated bandwidth, and is accompanied by the unsmoothed occupancy, species metadata and a reliability tier based on the number of occupied cells. Files. The data package is distributed as seven zip archives; extracting all of them into one folder recreates the folder nichegrid_v1 described in README.md. nichegrid_v1_core.zip contains the documentation, the metadata (species tables, data dictionary and processing ledger), the climate space (PCA model, lattice, climate background and climate of the 20-km land cells) and the R and Python reader functions. nichegrid_v1_niches_amphibians.zip, nichegrid_v1_niches_birds.zip, nichegrid_v1_niches_mammals.zip, nichegrid_v1_niches_plants.zip and nichegrid_v1_niches_reptiles.zip contain the native niches (density and occupancy) of each group, and nichegrid_v1_niches_introduced.zip the introduced-range niches. README.md, data_dictionary.csv and species_native.csv are also provided as single files. Tables are in Parquet and CSV format and can be read with standard tools in R and Python; checksums_sha256.txt lists the SHA-256 checksum of every file of the package. Terms of use. The data are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. The niches are derived from range maps whose terms of use do not permit commercial use of derived products. The record contains no range polygons and no rasterised range cells; the range maps can be obtained from IUCN and BirdLife International. Please cite this dataset and the data sources listed in README.md. Code. The code used to build and validate the dataset, including the R and Python reader functions, is available at https://github.com/ehsanrahimi666/nichegrid (release v1.1, MIT licence). Changes in version 1.1. CHELSA V2.1 stores annual precipitation (bio12) as 16-bit integers with a scale factor of 0.1, so pixels wetter than 6,553.5 mm are stored at that value. The new column bio12_ceiling_share of both species tables gives the share of each range in such pixels (bio12 summaries are lower bounds where it is above 0), and the new file space/bio12_ceiling_cells.csv lists the 1,223 land cells that contain them. The helper functions now stop with an error when a species listed without a niche is requested. The niche files, the climate space and all other values are identical to version 1.0.