DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13913002
title: TreeGOER Holdridge Life Zone Distributions: Observations for 48,129 tree species across 45 historical (1901-1920) and contemporary (1979-2013) terrestrial life zones

description: TreeGOER (Tree Globally Observed Environmental Ranges) is a database that documents the environmental ranges (minimum, maximum, median, mean and 5%, 25%, 75% and 95% quantiles) for 48,129 tree species and for 51 environmental variables, including 38 bioclimatic variables, 8 soil variables and 3 topographic variables. TreeGOER is available from the following Zenodo archives: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7922927.

The TreeGOER ranges were calculated after cleaning occurrence records and standardizing species names with the WorldFlora R package to World Flora Online or the World Checklist of Vascular Plants for a global GBIF occurrence download of 44,267,164 occurrences (GBIF.org 2021 GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.77gcvq). The process of compilation of TreeGOER with 30 arc-seconds global grid layers, two examples of BIOCLIM applications that investigated the effects of climate change on global tree diversity patterns and R scripts to repeat these analyses have been described by Kindt, R. (2023). TreeGOER: A database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Global Change Biology 29: 6303–6318. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16914.

This Zenodo archive documents the occurrence of the same previously compiled and cleaned observations for the TreeGOER across global raster layers that document the contemporary (1979-1920) and historical (1901-1920) distribution of 45 Terrestrial Life Zones. These global raster layers were created for the following article:



Elsen, P. R., Saxon, E. C., Simmons, B. A., Ward, M., Williams, B. A., Grantham, H. S., Kark, S., Levin, N., Perez-Hammerle, K.-V., Reside, A. E., & Watson, J. E. M. (2022). Accelerated shifts in terrestrial life zones under rapid climate change. Global Change Biology, 28, 918–935. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15962


and are available for download from DRYAD:



Elsen, Paul R.; Saxon, Earl C.; Simmons, B. Alexander; Ward, Michelle; Williams, Brooke A.; Grantham, Hedley S.; Kark, Salit; Levin, Noam; Perez-Hammerle, Katharina-Victoria; Reside, April E.; Watson, James E. M.; Perez‐Hammerle, Katharina‐Victoria. 2021. Data from: Accelerated shifts in terrestrial life zones under rapid climate change. Nov 05 2021 version files. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.41ns1rnff


The raster layers were processed using R and Google Earth Engine following the methodology described in Elsen et al (2022). Documentation of the different zones are partially available from this README file: https://datadryad.org/stash/downloads/file_stream/1145694

For each of the 48,129 tree species, the distribution is given for:



Contemporary climate: number of observations in life zones mapped by https://datadryad.org/stash/downloads/file_stream/1145680

Historical climate: number of observations in life zones mapped by https://datadryad.org/stash/downloads/file_stream/1145681

Mixed climate: number of observations for contemporary life zones if GBIF observations were from 1979 or later, and number of observations for historical life zones if GBIF observations were from before 1979

Static climate: number of observations in the same zone in the contemporary and historical climate. The number of observations in areas where the life zone changed are listed in the variable of 'H-0'.


Observations outside the life zone maps are listed in the variable of 'H-1'.

 

The development of this data set archive supported by the Darwin Initiative to project DAREX001 of Developing a Global Biodiversity Standard certification for tree-planting and restoration, by Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative through the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Ethiopia to the Provision of Adequate Tree Seed Portfolio project in Ethiopia, by the Green Climate Fund through the IUCN-led Transforming the Eastern Province of Rwanda through Adaptation and through the Readiness proposal on Climate Appropriate Portfolios of Tree Diversity for Burkina Faso projects, by the Bezos Earth Fund to the Quality Tree Seed for Africa in Kenya and Rwanda project and by the German International Climate Initiative (IKI) to the regional tree seed programme on The Right Tree for the Right Place for the Right Purpose in Africa.