Global assessment of ecoregion intactness

Abstract

This datasets consists of: (1) intactness scores for the world's terrestrial ecoregions in 1993 and 2009, recorded as a comma delimited text file, and as attribute fields in a terrestrial ecoregion polygon shapefile (Ecoregions2017_intactness.shp); and (2) two raster datasets representing derived intactness metrics (Q' and delta Q') for terrestrial areas at a 1 km resolution. To reduce file sizes the values in both rasters are multiplied by 1,000 and rounded to integers. Users should divide the values in each raster by 1,000 to recover the original scale of these variables. All spatial data uses the Mollweide projection.The spatial ecoregion data is sourced from Dinerstein et al 2017 BioScience DOI: 10.1093/biosci/bix014, with data available for download at: https://ecoregions2017.appspot.comFields in the tabular data include: Q1993_LL, Q1993, Q1993_UL, Q2009_LL, Q2009, Q2009_UL: intactess metric for 1993 and 2009, including estimates of the lower and upper limits (LL and UL respectively) based on alternative parameterisations of the distance scaling parameter. The fields Q1993 and Q2009 are likely to be of greatest relevance to most users.NCELLS: the number of cells used in the intactness calculation.PRHAB1993, PRHAB2009: estimates of the proportion of habitat in 1993 and 2009 using a binary interpretation of habitat (used to evaluate the properties of the intactness metric relative to more traditional measures).PLOTCAT: Nine categories of change in ecoregion intactness:2, 1, 3: High proportion of habitat with degrading, stable or increasing intactness respectively5, 4, 6: Moderate proportion of habitat with degrading, stable or increasing intactness respectively8, 7, 9: Low proportion of habitat with degrading, stable or increasing intactness respectivelySee the Beyer et al 2019 Conservation Letters paper for further details.