Fellow Maria Lumbierres led the production of Area of Habitat maps for 5,481 terrestrial mammal and 10,651 terrestrial bird species, in collaboration with fellows Prabhat Raj Dahal and Carmen Soria. These maps, now available to the research and conservation communities, will prove invaluable to guide conservation planning and monitoring. The authors then used these Area of Habitat maps to produce global maps of the species richness of mammals, birds, globally threatened mammals and globally threatened birds.
Publication:
Lumbierres, M., Dahal, P.R., Soria, C.D., Di Marco, M., Butchart, S.H.M., Donald, P.F., Rondinini, C. (2022) Area of Habitat maps for the world’s terrestrial birds and mammals. Scientific Data 9, 749 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01838-w → Open Access repository
Abstract: Area of Habitat (AOH) is “the habitat available to a species, that is, habitat within its range”. It complements a geographic range map for a species by showing potential occupancy and reducing commission errors. AOH maps are produced by subtracting areas considered unsuitable for the species from their range map, using information on each species’ associations with habitat and elevation. We present AOH maps for 5,481 terrestrial mammal and 10,651 terrestrial bird species (including 1,816 migratory bird species for which we present separate maps for the resident, breeding and non-breeding areas). Our maps have a resolution of 100 m. On average, AOH covered 66 ± 28% of the range maps for mammals and 64 ± 27% for birds. The AOH maps were validated independently, following a novel two-step methodology: a modelling approach to identify outliers and a species-level approach based on point localities. We used AOH maps to produce global maps of the species richness of mammals, birds, globally threatened mammals and globally threatened birds.
The dataset is available here: Lumbierres, M., Dahal, P.R., Soria, C.D., Di Marco, M., Butchart, S.H.M., Donald, P.F., Rondinini, C. (2022) Area of Habitat maps for the world’s terrestrial birds and mammals. Dryad, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.02v6wwq48 → Open Access Repository
(figure from the article, no changes were made)