High-resolution BIOCLIM and ENVIREM grids for Europe in consecutive 100-year bins spanning the last 21,000 years

Here, I provide a dataset of gridded climatic variables at a spatial resolution of 30 arc-seconds for 210 consecutive 100-year bins spanning the period from 21,000 to 0 BP. The dataset includes 19 bioclimatic and 16 ENVIREM variables (described by Title & Bemmels, 2018) commonly used in species distribution modelling. It covers the European continent and adjacent regions within the following boundaries: 32.5°W–70°E and 32.5°N–82.5°N.

For each 100-year bin, bioclimatic and ENVIREM variables were calculated based on the downscaled and debiased monthly temperature and precipitation simulations of the Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3; Collins et al., 2006) as provided by the PaleoView software (Fordham et al., 2017). The downscaling procedure was based on the delta-change method (Ramirez Villejas & Jarvis, 2010). As a baseline climatic data, I used monthly temperature and precipitation grids from the CHELSA database for 1940–1989 (Karger et al., 2017).

A detailed description of the dataset, including the downscaling method applied, can be found in the Technical specification attached to this dataset.