9-second gridded continental Australia change in effective area of similar ecological environments (cleared natural areas) for Vascular Plants 1990:2050 CanESM2 RCP 8.5 (CMIP5) (GDM: VAS_v5_r11)

Brief description

Proportional change in effective area of similar ecological environments for vascular plants as a function of land clearing and change in long term (30 year average) climates between the present (1990 centred) and projected future (2050 centred) under the CanESM2 model (RCP 8.5) based on Generalised Dissimilarity Modelling (GDM) of compositional turnover.

This metric describes the combined effects of climate change and land clearing on the area of similar environments to each grid cell as a proportion. Each cell is compared with a sample of 60,000 points in both the present uncleared landscape and an alternative scenario (either present with clearing, or future with clearing), and the pairwise similarities summed (e.g. a completely similar cell will contribute 1, a dissimilar cell 0, with a range of values in between). The contribution of each cell is scaled by the land condition. For each time point, this describes the area of similar environments, which will be low for rare environments and high for widely distributed environments. By dividing the test area by the current area, we are able to quantify the reduction in area as a function of land use/climate change. Values less than one indicate a reduction, values of 1 no change, and values greater than 1 (rare cases in the north) show an increase in similar environments.

This metric was developed along with others for use in an assessment of the efficacy of the protected area system for biodiversity under climate change at continental and global scales, presented at the IUCN World Parks Congress 2014. It is described in the AdaptNRM Guide “Implications of Climate Change for Biodiversity: a community-level modelling approach”, available online at: www.adaptnrm.org.

Data are provided in two forms:
1. Zipped ESRI float grids: Binary float grids (*.flt) with associated ESRI header files (*.hdr) and projection files (*.prj). After extracting from the zip archive, these files can be imported into most GIS software packages, and can be used as other binary file formats by substituting the appropriate header file.
2. ArcGIS layer package (*.lpk): These packages contain can be unpacked by ArcGIS as a raster with associated legend.

Additionally a short methods summary is provided in the file 9sMethodsSummary.pdf for further information.

Layers in this 9s series use a consistent naming convention:
BIOLOGICAL GROUP _ FROM BASE_ TO SCENARIO_ ANALYSIS
e.g. A_90_CAN85_S or R_90_MIR85_L
where BIOLOGICAL GROUP is A: Vascular Plants, M: Vascular Plants, R: Vascular Plants and V: vascular plants

Lineage: Proportional change in the area of similar ecological environments was calculated using the highly parallel bespoke CSIRO Muru software running on a LINUX high-performance-computing cluster, taking GDM model transformed environmental grids as inputs. Proportional change was calculated by taking the area of baseline ecological environments similar to each present cell as the denominator and the area of future degraded ecological environments similar to each present cell (with the contribution of each cell scaled by a Natural Areas condition grid 0, degraded to 1 intact) as the numerator. More detail of the calculations and methods are given in the document “9sMethodsSummary.pdf” provided with the data download.
GDM Model: \t
Generalised dissimilarity model of compositional turnover in vascular plant species for continental Australia at 9 second resolution using ANHAT data extracted 4 April 2013 (GDM: VAS_v5_r11)
Climate data. Models were built and projected using:
a) 9-second gridded climatology for continental Australia 1976-2005: Summary variables with elevation and radiative adjustment
b) 9-second gridded climatology for continental Australia 2036-2065 CanESM2 RCP 8.5 (CMIP5): Summary variables with elevation and radiative adjustment
Natural Areas Mask (intact/degraded land)
Australian Government Department of the Environment (2014) Natural areas of Australia - 100 metre (digital dataset and metadata). Available at http://www.environment.gov.au/metadataexplorer/explorer.jsp and up to date information for Western Australia were provided at 25m Albers projection were reprojected to GDA94, merged and aggregated to a continuous measure of proportion of intact area per grid cell at 9s.