TreeGOER Whittaker Terrestrial Biome Distributions: Observations for 48,129 tree species across and outside nine biome types

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. TreeGOER is available from the following Zenodo archives: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7922927

The TreeGOER 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 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 29: 6303–6318. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16914.

This Zenodo archive documents the occurrence of the same previously compiled and cleaned observations for the TreeGOER via the mean annual temperature (BIO01) and annual precipitation (BIO12) obtained via WorldClim 2.1 across Whittaker terrestrial biome types (Figure 4.10 in Whittaker 1970), based on a modified figure from Ricklef’s The Economy of Nature (8^th Edition from 2008). Note that Whittaker (1970) remarked that “The pattern of Figure 4.10 is a considerable simplification” and that “Boundaries between types are, for a number of reasons, approximate. In climates between forest and desert, maritime versus continental climates, soil effects, and fire effects can shift the balance between woodland, shrubland, and grassland types”.

A SpatialPolygonsDataFrame that allows plotting the Whittaker biome types was obtained from the plotbiomes R package (how this dataset was created from Figure 5.5 in Ricklefs 2008 is described here). The Y coordinates of this dataset were transformed from a cm to a dm scale, and the data was saved as a shapefile that is available in this Zenodo archive. Before saving, an additional identifier (“b_score”) was added that approximately scores biome types of higher temperatures or precipitation higher (see the figure included in this archive). For observations occurring on the boundaries of the polygons, this variable was used to assign observations to the biome type with the higher score. See this Rpub for details on the treatment of boundary and outside locations and for a function to extract the biome type.

For each of the 48,129 tree species, the distribution is given as the number of observations in the following zones:

Citations

• Ricklefs, R. E., Relyea, R. (2018). Ecology: The Economy of Nature. United States: W.H. Freeman.
• Whittaker, R. H. (1970). Communities and ecosystems.
• Valentin Ștefan, & Sam Levin. (2018). plotbiomes: R package for plotting Whittaker biomes with ggplot2 (v1.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7145245
• Kindt, R. (2023). TreeGOER: A database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Global Change Biology 29: 6303–6318. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16914
• Fick, S. E., & Hijmans, R. J. (2017). WorldClim 2: New 1-km spatial resolution climate surfaces for global land areas. International Journal of Climatology, 37(12), 4302–4315. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5086

Funding

The development of this data set archive 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, by the Green Climate Fund through the IUCN-led Transforming the Eastern Province of Rwanda through Adaptation and through the Readiness proposal on Climate Appropriate Portfolios of Tree Diversity for Burkina Faso projects, by the Bezos Earth Fund to the Quality Tree Seed for Africa in Kenya and Rwanda project and by the German International Climate Initiative (IKI) to the regional tree seed programme on The Right Tree for the Right Place for the Right Purpose in Africa.