BHI v2: Biodiversity Habitat Index: 30s global time series

Brief description

CSIRO Biodiversity Habitat Index (BHI v2) is a global 30 arc-second product for 2000,2005,2010,2015 and 2020. BHI estimates the level of species diversity expected to be retained within any given spatial reporting unit (e.g., a country, a broad ecosystem type, or the entire planet) as a function of the unit’s area, connectivity and integrity of natural ecosystems across it. Results for the indicator can either be expressed as 1) the ‘effective proportion of habitat’ remaining within the unit – adjusting for the effects of the condition and functional connectivity of habitat, and of spatial variation in the species composition of ecological communities (beta diversity); or 2) the effective proportion of habitat that can be translated, through standard species-area analysis, into a prediction of the proportion of species expected to persist (i.e. avoid extinction) over the long term.

The BHI is used to monitor and report past-to-present trends in the expected persistence of species diversity 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. A wide variety of data sources can be used for this purpose, spanning spatial scales from global to subnational, and including data assembled by countries for deriving ecosystem condition accounts under the UN SEEA Ecosystem Accounting framework. The BHI can also serve as a leading indicator for assessing the contribution that proposed or implemented area-based actions are expected to make towards 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

The Biodiversity Habitat Index 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).