Pan-European Biodiversity Index (PEBI)

Pan-European Biodiversity Index (PEBI): 5-km hexagonal grid dataset for Europe

This dataset provides the Pan-European Biodiversity Index (PEBI), a composite biodiversity exposure metric developed for use in large-scale environmental epidemiological studies, together with the nine underlying indicator scores from which it is built. Values are provided at the level of a 5-km hexagonal grid (245,258 cells) spanning 29 European countries.

Environmental epidemiology has historically relied on proxies for vegetation quantity, such as NDVI or distance to greenspace, to characterise the natural environment, but these say little about biodiversity itself. PEBI was developed to close this gap: it integrates habitat availability, landscape diversity, and plant and animal species richness into a single, harmonised metric suitable for use as an exposure variable across large, multi-country health studies. Bird and vascular plant richness, not directly observable at this resolution from occurrence records alone, were estimated from 289 million GBIF records using spatially cross-validated random forest models. PEBI captures a dimension of the urban and rural environment distinct from conventional greenness metrics such as NDVI and distance to greenspace, and its city-level rankings are robust to substantial perturbation of the underlying indicator weights.

Each row in the dataset corresponds to one hexagonal grid cell and includes a unique cell identifier, geometry, the nine individual indicator scores (each classified 1 to 5 via Jenks natural breaks, where 5 indicates the highest value), a count of how many of the nine indicators had valid, non-missing data for that cell, and the final composite PEBI score:

• hex_id: unique grid cell identifier
• permeable_area_score, protected_area_score, green_area_score, coastal_blue_score, inland_blue_score: habitat availability indicators
• land_use_diversity_score, habitat_richness_score: landscape diversity indicators
• bird_richness_score, plant_richness_score: species diversity indicators (Chao1-corrected, random-forest imputed where GBIF coverage was insufficient)
• n_valid_indicators: number of the nine indicators with valid data for that cell (out of 9)
• pebi_score: the composite Pan-European Biodiversity Index
• geom: cell geometry (hexagonal, 5 km circumradius)

This dataset incorporates third-party data and should be cited alongside the following sources: species occurrence data from GBIF (cite the associated GBIF derived-dataset DOI); land cover data from the Copernicus/EEA CORINE Land Cover Plus Backbone; and protected area boundaries from the EEA's Natura 2000 and Emerald Network datasets. Please retain these attributions when reusing this data, in addition to citing this Zenodo record.

Licensed under CC BY 4.0.