Dataset for "Gains in biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services from the expansion of the planet's protected areas"

Overview of dataset

This dataset consists of nine raster layers representing modelled scenarios to meet the target of protecting 30% of all land areas, under three key objectives (i.e. maximizing landscape intactness, species conservation potential and ecosystem services):

Objective

Scenario/indicator

Filename

Landscape intactness

Human footprint

HumanFootprint_30.tif

Landscape intactness

Ecosystem intactness

EcosystemIntactness_30.tif

Landscape intactness

Biodiversity intactness

BiodiversityIntactness_30.tif

Biodiversity conservation

Total species richness

TotalSpeciesRichness_30.tif

Biodiversity conservation

Threatened species richness

TheatenedSpeciesRichness_30.tif

Biodiversity conservation

Range-size rarity

RangeSizeRarity_30.tif

Biodiversity conservation

Key biodiversity areas

SizeKBA_30.tif

Ecosystem services

Climate-change mitigation potential

ClimateChangeMitigation_30.tif

Ecosystem services

Nutrient-regulation potential

NutrientRegulation_30.tif

It also contains one R-script that provides an example of our analyses. This dataset is designed to accompany Zeng et al. and the full methodology is described in that publication.

Briefly, we first calculated the coverage of existing protected areas, and the coverage needed to close the gap to achieve the target of protecting 30% of all land areas, across 238 countries. We then assigned the placement of these areas based on nine scenarios representing three key objectives—prioritizing the intactness of landscapes, species conservation potential, and ecosystem services. Here we select and ensure that the highest-ranked areas retain their present conservation value across these objectives. Last, we quantified the biodiversity, climate-change mitigation and nutrient-regulation benefits.