Integrating carbon stocks and landscape connectivity for nature-based climate solutions

This project aimed to integrate maps of terrestrial carbon stocks (Sothe et al. 2022) and landscape connectivity (Pither et al. 2021) in Ontario, Canada at 300m spatial resolution to identify areas important for nature-based climate solutions. This dataset contains 2 maps — one examining the overlap of current density estimates from circuit theory (proportional to the probability of animal movement), with forest carbon storage estimates (above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, and dead plants) and the other current density with soil carbon storage estimates (0 - 1m depth). We used a bivariate mapping approach to identify important areas of overlap between current density and carbon layers. We calculated quantiles at 20% intervals for the current density, forest, and soil carbon layers and then reclassified cell values for each raster layer with a value of 1 - 5 based on which percentile range they fell within. We then overlapped the current density map with each carbon map to produce two bivariate maps for current density by forest carbon and current density by soil carbon. Cell values for the bivariate maps were calculated using all unique combinations of the two layers, which resulted in 25 different cell values (5 × 5 matrix). The data are rasters with values ranging from 1 - 25 representing a varying degree of importance for each layer. Please refer to the publication for detailed methodology.