Nogués-Bravo, D. & Araújo, M.B. 2006 Species richness, area and climate correlates. Global Ecology and Biogeography 15: 452–460.
Araújo et al. 2005. Downscaling European species atlas distributions to a finer resolution: implications for conservation planning. Global Ecology and Biogeography 14: 17-30.
We provide data as standard text files. The first two collumns are lat long coordinates; the following collumns are species. Rows are grid cells. Values on the table are potential presences and absences of species in grid cells. You need a GIS to properly visualise the data, although software that is able to plot scatter diagrams (e.g. Excel) can allow you to visualise data.
Both current and future species distributions data CANNOT be interpreted as actual distributions. They represent species’ potential distributions or, to be more precise, the distributions of suitable climate space for species. Therefore it is possible to find predicted distributions in areas where the species do not exist, but where suitable climate conditions may be found.
We provide a relatively small ensemble of projections that enable users to measure the uncertainty of our forecasts. If users are not interested in measuring uncertainties we recommend using ANN projections, since these were shown to reflect the main consensus in the data.
We provide data as standard text files. The first two collumns are lat long coordinates; the following collumns are species distributions data. Rows are grid cells. Values on the table are not standard presence and absence as for the amphibian and reptile data. Instead, data was coded as follows: (-2) currently suitable, projected to become unsuitable in the future; (-1) currently suitable, sprojected to remain suitable; (0) currently unsuitable, projected to remain unsuitable; (1) currently unsuitable, projected to become suitable. You need a GIS to properly visualise the data, although software that is able to plot scatter diagrams (e.g. Excel) can allow you to visualise data.