North American Tree and Shrub Distributions on a 25-km Climate Grid

USGS Professional Paper 1650 presents an atlas of relations between climatic parameters and the distributions of important trees and shrubs across North America. The data is structured on a 25-km equal-area grid, comparing modern climatic variables with digitized species presence/absence records. This work was produced by the USGS for biogeographic, paleoclimatic, and global-change research.

Use Cases

• Model species presence/absence on the 25-km grid using climatic and bioclimatic parameters as predictors.
• Analyze the graphical and tabular relations between specific climatic variables and the geographic range of selected tree species.
• Use the digitized species distribution maps as a baseline for projecting range shifts under future climate scenarios.
• Correlate modern instrumental weather records with plant distributions for continental-scale biogeographic studies.

Strengths

• Continental-scale coverage of North America.
• Data integrated on a standardized 25-km equal-area grid for direct comparison.

Limitations

• Specific row count, column details, and temporal range of the instrumental records are not provided.
• The dataset focuses on a selected set of important tree and shrub species, not a complete flora.

Provenance

Source

USGS Professional Paper 1650, chapters A and B.

Collection Method

Climatic parameters constructed from instrumental weather records; species distributions digitized and mapped to a 25-km grid.

Geography

North America