Modified input files to produce retrospective biodiversity assessment in two Baltic Sea basins using BEAT 3.0 tool

This is a short description and file share of our retrospective integreated biodidversity assessment produced in two of the Baltic Sea basins: Gulf of Finland and Bothnian Sea. The assessment was conducted using Integreated Biodivesity Assessment Tool BEAT 3.0 developed in BalticBOOST project. The tool is available online at: zenodo.org/record/1288315#.XR3byWcXYg5. More detailed information about the tool and metadata is offered by Nygård et al. 2018.

Here I offer only the files that were modified for our analysis. All the input files and the code to run the tool can be found from the website mentioned above.

Modified input files:

• EcosystemComponents.txt: We updated the list of ecosystem components. For exmaple bird indicators were in a species level in the original input file but as we had them in a functional group level, we updated this to the file.
• IndicatorCatalogue.txt: Updated the list of indicators.
• ooao.txt: one-out-all-out rule is applied to some of the indicators. We added white-tailed eagle to this file as this indicator contains three attributes and if one of these are considered to be below good environmental status, the whole indicator is considered to be below good environmental status.
• SAU.txt file: We added more spatial assessment units (SAUs) to the tool. After level 4 we added one more level: 5, that covers water bodies in the Southwest inner and outer archipelago and Gulf of Finland inner and outer archipelago. The last 97 rows in the file are new areas we added. NOTE: from these, there are 3 level 6 areas because  the tool worked better if there was more levels that were actually used. The level 6 did not have any data and thus it was included only for the tool to work better.

Additionally, we modified the indicators.txt file to contain our indicator dataset. The file is not provided here but there is a file in the BEAT website that can be used for running the code.

About running the tool

We did only small modification to the tool itself (file BOOSTbiodiv.R, offered in the BEAT tool website):

OutputECDetailLevel<-5 (row 53)
OutputSAUDetailLevel<-6 (row 54)

Also, as we produced retrospective assessment which means that we used 5 year running average of the indicators and assessed every 5 year set separately, also the code needed to be run for each indicator set of 5 years separately. After this, we merged all the needed results files. The merged results table is available here: zenodo.org/record/3266843#.XR3272cXYg4.