BERI v2: Bioclimatic Ecosystem Resilience Index: 30s global time series

Brief description

CSIRO Bioclimatic Ecosystem Resilience Index (BERI v2) is a global 30 arc-second product for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. BERI measures the capacity of natural ecosystems to retain species diversity in the face of climate change, as a function of ecosystem area, connectivity and integrity. The indicator assesses the extent to which any given spatial configuration of natural habitat across a landscape will promote or hinder climate-induced shifts in biological distributions. It does this by analyzing the functional connectivity of each grid-cell of natural habitat to areas of habitat in the surrounding landscape which are projected to support a similar assemblage of species under climate change to that currently associated with the cell of interest. The indicator can then be aggregated and reported by any desired spatial unit – e.g. an ecosystem type, a country, or the entire planet.

The BERI can be used to monitor and report past-to-present trends in the capacity of ecosystems to retain species diversity in the face of ongoing climate change by repeatedly recalculating the indicator using best-available mapping of ecosystem condition or integrity observed at multiple points in time, e.g. for different years. It can also serve as a leading indicator for assessing the contribution that proposed or implemented area-based actions are expected to make to enhancing the present capacity of ecosystems to retain species diversity, thereby providing a foundation for strategic prioritisation of such actions by countries.

Aggregation of the raw data for reporting by a region (country, ecoregion etc.) should follow the procedure in the folder " Calculating weighted geometric means of CSIRO BILBI indicators for a region"

Lineage

BERI is calculated using the CSIRO BILBI biodiversity modelling infrastructure. BILBI is based on a global 30s grid, with environmental data comprising terrain adjusted www.WorldClim.org (v1) climate data and soil data from www.SoilGrids.org (v1). This was combined with www.GBIF.org (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) data to generate spatial biodiversity models (using Generalised Dissimilarity Modelling) for each WWF biome/realm combination. Habitat condition is calculated from downscaled Land Use Harmonisation surfaces ( using land cover data from www.esa-landcover-cci.org/) combined with coefficients from the PREDICTS database (www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/our-work/biodiversity/predicts.html).