Global Critical Areas for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 2km and 10km Rasters

Rachel Neugarten from Cornell University created this dataset containing spatial optimization outputs for global conservation planning. It includes raster files from three optimization scenarios evaluating trade-offs between nature's contributions to people, biodiversity, and development potential. The data supports findings that conserving half of global land area could provide 90% of ten nature's contributions and meet representation targets for 26,709 terrestrial vertebrate species.

Use Cases

• Identify priority conservation areas based on nature's contributions to people targets ranging from 5% to 95%.
• Analyze spatial conflicts between conservation goals and development suitability for agriculture, energy, and mining.
• Evaluate conservation scenarios that include existing protected areas and OECMs (Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures).
• Reproduce global spatial analyses on synergies between biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human development.

Strengths

• Includes outputs from 19 different spatial optimization runs per scenario, with NCP targets in 5% increments.
• Provides summary rasters where values from 0-19 indicate selection frequency across all scenarios.
• Data is associated with a peer-reviewed paper analyzing global conservation commitments.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Cornell University

Collection Method

Spatial optimizations run using the prioritizr R package on global data.

Geography

Global land area