TreeGOER: Tree Globally Observed Environmental Ranges

TreeGOER (Tree Globally Observed Environmental Ranges) is a database that documents the environmental ranges (minimum, maximum, median, mean and 5%, 25%, 75% and 95% quantiles) for 48,129 tree species and for 51 environmental variables, including 38 bioclimatic variables, 8 soil variables and 3 topographic variables. These ranges were calculated after cleaning occurrence records and standardizing species names with the WorldFlora R package to World Flora Online or the World Checklist of Vascular Plants for a global GBIF occurrence download of 44,267,164 occurrences (GBIF.org 2021 GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.77gcvq). The 5% and 95% quantiles were calculated separately for two methods of outlier detection and for the full data set. The process of compilation of TreeGOER with 30 arc-seconds global grid layers, two examples of BIOCLIM applications that investigated the effects of climate change on global tree diversity patterns and R scripts to repeat these analyses have been described by Kindt, R. (2023). TreeGOER: A database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Global Change Biology, 00, 1–16. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16914.

TreeGOER can be used in combination with the CitiesGOER database (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8175429) that documents the conditions for the same environmental variables (except elevation) for 52,602 cities with a human population ≥ 5000. TreeGOER could also be used with the TreeGOER Global Zones atlas that can be obtained from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252756. This high resolution atlas includes sheets with global zones for the Climatic Moisture Index (CMI) and the number of months with average temperature > 10 degrees C (Tmo10); these are zones for which presence of the 48,129 species was documented by TreeGOER.

Changes between different versions of the databases are documented in a specific sheet in the metadata file.

The development of TreeGOER was supported by the Darwin Initiative to project DAREX001 of Developing a Global Biodiversity Standard certification for tree-planting and restoration, by Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative through the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Ethiopia to the Provision of Adequate Tree Seed Portfolio project in Ethiopia, and by the Green Climate Fund through the IUCN-led Transforming the Eastern Province of Rwanda through Adaptation project. When using TreeGOER in your work, cite the publication (Kindt 2023) as well as this repository using the DOI (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7922927).