Global land-use and land-cover data for ecologists: Historical, current, and future scenarios

Abstract

Land-use land-cover (LULC) data are important predictors of species occurrence and biodiversity threat. Although there are LULC datasets available for ecologists under current conditions, there is a lack of such data under historical and future climatic conditions. This hinders, for example, projecting niche and distribution models under global change scenarios at different times. The Land Use Harmonization Project (LUH2) is a global terrestrial dataset at 0.25o spatial resolution that provides LULC data from 850 to 2300 for 12 LULC state classes. The dataset, however, is compressed in a file format (NetCDF) that is incompatible with most ecological analysis and intractable for most ecologists. Here we selected and transformed the LUH2 data in order to make it more useful for ecological studies. We provide LULC for every year from 850 to 2100, with data from 2015 on provided under two Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP2 and SSP5). We provide two types of file for each year: separate files with continuous values for each of the 12 LULC state classes, and a single categorical file with all state classes combined. To create the categorical layer, we assigned the state with the highest value in a given pixel among the 12 continuous data. The final dataset provides LULC data for 1251 years that will be of interest for macroecology, ecological niche modeling, global change analysis, and other applications in ecology and conservation. We also provide a description of LUH2 prediction of future LULC change through time.

Assessing digital accessible botanical knowledge and priorities for exploration and discovery of plant diversity across Mesoamerica

“…For land‐use changes, we assessed the transition among land‐use categories over the last 60 yr. We obtained the land‐use data from Vale et al . (2021), which provides global terrestrial surfaces at 15‐arc‐min resolution with yearly land‐use data. We extracted data between 1960 and 2015 and summarised the original 12 land‐use categories into two broad categories (see Methods S1): VEG: forested and nonforested vegetation; and HU: human use.…”

Juçara palm ecological interactions threatened by climate and land‐cover changes

“…Since the target species occur mostly in native vegetation, we limited the predicted distribution using forest cover data from the Land‐Use Harmonization project (LUH2), available at 0.25° × 0.25° spatial resolution (ca. 900 km 2 ) (Hurtt et al, 2020; Vale et al, 2021). We selected land‐cover data from 2000 as historical time and 2060 as future conditions, matching the macroclimatic data (considering the last year of the range date).…”

“…We selected land-cover data from 2000 as historical time and 2060 as future conditions, matching the macroclimatic data (considering the last year of the range date). We only used the forest cover categories "forested primary land," "potentially forested secondary land," which refers to Atlantic Forest vegetation, and "rangeland," which refers to Cerrado vegetation (Vale et al, 2021). We attributed the value 1 for forested and rangeland and 0 for everything else.…”

Present and future distribution of bat hosts of sarbecoviruses: implications for conservation and public health

“…Furthermore, most of our target species benefit from forest physiognomies (electronic supplementary material, figure S2). Forest habitat was calculated as a proportion from LUH2 [51] for near-current and future scenarios at 0.25 dd, so we resampled all other layers through bilinear interpolation to match this resolution. Distance to cave or karst was the only static variable.…”