Published June 30, 2020 | Version v1
Journal article Open

A grid-based map for the Biogeographical Regions of Europe

  • 1. Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences (BiGeA), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
  • 2. Department of Life, Health & Environmental Science, University of L'Aquila, Coppito, L'Aquila, Italy
  • 3. Research Unit of Biodiversity (CSIC/UO/PA), Univ. of Oviedo, Mieres, Principado de Asturias, Spain
  • 4. Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences (BiGeA), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy|Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Department of Applied Geoinformatics and Spatial Planning, Praha, Czech Republic
  • 5. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
  • 6. Department of Geography, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
  • 7. Biogeography and Biodiversity Lab, Institute of Physical Geography, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany
  • 8. Biogeography Department, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
  • 9. Biogeography Department, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany|School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
  • 10. Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, Rome, Italy

Description

Biogeographical units are widely adopted in ecological research and nature conservation management, even though biogeographical regionalisation is still under scientific debate. The European Environment Agency provided an official map of the European Biogeographical Regions (EBRs), which contains the official boundaries used in the Habitats and Birds Directives. However, these boundaries bisect cells in the official EU 10 km × 10 km grid used for many purposes, including reporting species and habitat data, meaning that 6881 cells overlap two or more regions. Therefore, superimposing the EBRs vector map over the grid creates ambiguities in associating some cells with European Biogeographical Regions.

To provide an operational tool to unambiguously define the boundaries of the eleven European Biogeographical Regions, we provide a specifically developed raster map of Grid-Based European Biogeographical Regions (GB-EBRs). In this new map, the borders of the EBRs are reshaped to coherently match the standard European 10 km × 10 km grid imposed for reporting tasks by Article 17 of the Habitats Directive and used for many other datasets. We assign each cell to the EBR with the largest area within the cell.

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