DOI: 10.5061/dryad.8w9ghx3nr
title: Worldclim 2.1 versus Worldclim 1.4: climatic niche and grid resolution affect between-version mismatches in habitat suitability models predictions across Europe

description: The influence of climate on the distribution of taxa has been extensively
 investigated in the last two decades through Habitat Suitability Models
 (HSMs). In this context, the Worldclim database represents an invaluable
 data source as it provides worldwide climate surfaces for both historical
 and future time horizons. Thousands of HSMs-based papers have been
 published taking advantage of Worldclim 1.4, the first online version of
 this repository. In 2017, Worldclim 2.1 was released. Here, we evaluated
 spatially explicit prediction mismatch at continental scale, focusing on
 Europe, between HSMs fitted using climate surfaces from the two Worldclim
 versions (between-version differences). To this aim, we simulated
 occurrence probability and presence-absence across Europe of four virtual
 species (VS) with differing climate-occurrence relationships. For each VS,
 we fitted HSMs upon uncorrelated bioclimatic variables derived from each
 Worldclim version at three grid resolutions. For each factor combination,
 HSMs attaining sufficient discrimination performance on spatially
 independent test data were projected across Europe under current
 conditions and various future scenarios, and importance scores of the
 single variables were computed. HSMs failed in accurately retrieving the
 simulated climate-occurrence relationships for the climate-tolerant VS and
 the one occurring under a narrow combination of climatic conditions. Under
 current climate, noticeable between-version prediction mismatch emerged
 across most of Europe for these two VSs, whose simulated suitability
 mainly depended upon diurnal or yearly variability in temperature;
 differently, between-version differences were more clustered toward areas
 showing extreme values, like mountainous massifs or southern regions, for
 VSs responding to average temperature and precipitation trends. Under
 future climate, the chosen emission scenarios and Global Climate Models
 did not evidently influence between-version prediction discrepancies,
 while grid resolution synergistically interacted with VSs’ niche
 characteristics in determining extent of such differences. Our findings
 could help in re-evaluating previous biodiversity-related works relying on
 geographical predictions from Worldclim-based HSMs.
description: This dataset contains all the information needed to replicate the
 analyses reported in the article entitled "Worldclim 2.1 versus
 Worldclim 1.4: climatic niche and grid resolution affect between-version
 mismatches in Habitat Suitability Models predictions across Europe.",
 by Francesco Cerasoli, Paola D'Alessandro and Maurizio
 Biondi.<br> Specifically, users will find: 1)
 Presence-absence records generated for each virtual species * sampling
 replicate combination, and used to fit the Habitat Suitability Models (in
 csv format).<br> 2) Raster files representing simulated occurrence
 probability and presence-absence of each virtual species across Europe (in
 .tif format).<br> 3) The R script written to conduct all the
 reported analyses (in .R format). Please see the README
 file for further details about the three above-listed elements of this
 dataset.