DOI: 10.5061/dryad.np5hqbzv1
title: Disentangling effects of climate and land use on biodiversity and ecosystem services – a multi-scale experimental design

description: 1. Climate and land-use change are key drivers of environmental
 degradation in the Anthropocene, but too little is known about their
 interactive effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Long-term data
 on biodiversity trends are currently lacking. Furthermore, previous
 ecological studies have rarely considered climate and land use in a joint
 design, did not achieve variable independence or lost statistical power by
 not covering the full range of environmental gradients. 2. Here, we
 introduce a multi-scale space-for-time study design to disentangle effects
 of climate and land use on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The site
 selection approach coupled extensive GIS-based exploration and correlation
 heatmaps with a crossed and nested design covering regional, landscape and
 local scales. Its implementation in Bavaria (Germany) resulted in a set of
 study plots that maximize the potential range and independence of
 environmental variables at different spatial scales.
 3. Stratifying the state of Bavaria into five climate zones
 (reference period 1981–2010) and three prevailing land-use types, i.e.
 near-natural, agriculture and urban, resulted in 60 study regions (5.8x5.8
 km quadrants) covering a mean annual temperature gradient of 5.6–9.8 °C
 and a spatial extent of ~310x310 km. Within these regions, we nested 180
 study plots located in contrasting local land-use types, i.e. forests,
 grasslands, arable land or settlement (local climate gradient 4.5–10 °C).
 This approach achieved low correlations between climate and land use
 (proportional cover) at the regional and landscape scale with |r≤0.33| and
 |r≤0.29|, respectively. Furthermore, using correlation heatmaps for local
 plot selection reduced potentially confounding relationships between
 landscape composition and configuration for plots located in forests,
 arable land and settlements. 4. The suggested design expands upon
 previous research in covering a significant range of environmental
 gradients and including a diversity of dominant land-use types at
 different scales within different climatic contexts. It allows independent
 assessment of the relative contribution of multi-scale climate and land
 use on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Understanding potential
 interdependencies among global change drivers is essential to develop
 effective restoration and mitigation strategies against biodiversity
 decline, especially in expectation of future climatic changes.
 Importantly, this study also provides a baseline for long-term ecological
 monitoring programs.
description: The data sets contains climate and land-use variables resulting
 from the selection of 179 study plots within 60 study regions in Bavaria,
 Germany. The nested, large-scale design aimed to minimize correlations
 between land use and climate across the regional and local scale, while
 also reducing the correlation between the configuration (edge density) and
 composition (% land use cover) of landscapes in 1-km scale around the
 study plots. We also provide the R code used to
 calculate correlations and create graphs on Zenodo.
description: The ReadMe file contains an explanation of all variables of the
 main datasets used in the analyses and their measurement units.