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  Remaining Natural Habitats of the Indo-Malayan Realm (1997) »

  General Data License (excluding WDPA)

  Datasets Available from UNEP-WCMC: Excluding WDPA
  Access to UNEP-WCMC datasets is provided on the understanding that you read and consent to be bound by the Terms and Conditions attached. For the purposes of this Agreement the “Data” comprise any of the spatial data and associated attribute data downloadable from the UNEP-WCMC website, excluding the World Database on Protected Areas.

  Read the data policy here

  This dataset was derived from a variety of sources to provide a dataset of the remaining natural habitats of the Indo-Malayan Realm at around the year 1990; change over time can be seen when used alongside the original natural habitats dataset. It was produced alongside the publication "Protected Areas Systems Review of the Indo-Malayan Realm, Mackinnon, J. ed. 1997" in collaboration with The Asian Bureau for Conservation (ABC). This was produced to document the growth and changing character of the protected areas systems of the region over the ten year period 1986-1996. This was in the hope of aiding conservationists and development practioners to conserve Asia's rich biological resources upon which so many depend.

  Resource Type: Spatial Data / Maps
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  Global Wilderness (1998) »

  General Data License (excluding WDPA)

  Datasets Available from UNEP-WCMC: Excluding WDPA
  Access to UNEP-WCMC datasets is provided on the understanding that you read and consent to be bound by the Terms and Conditions attached. For the purposes of this Agreement the “Data” comprise any of the spatial data and associated attribute data downloadable from the UNEP-WCMC website, excluding the World Database on Protected Areas.

  Read the data policy here

  Based on the Wilderness Index developed by the Australian Heritage Commission (R. Lesslie, in litt., 30 May 1998). The wilderness value of any given point is essentially a measure of remoteness from human influence and is assessed on the basis of: remoteness from settlement (settled land or points of permanent occupation), from access (constructed vehicle access routes), and apparent naturalness (remoteness from permanent manmade structures) (Lesslie and Maslen, 1995). The analysis is carried out on a grid, using data from the Digital Chart of the World (DCW), and remoteness is measured as a distance from each grid point to the nearest feature of each class within a given radius (generally 30 km). Wilderness value is the sum of standardised values for each indicator class.

  Resource Type: Spatial Data / Maps
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  Holdridge's Life Zones (1992) »

  General Data License (excluding WDPA)

  Datasets Available from UNEP-WCMC: Excluding WDPA
  Access to UNEP-WCMC datasets is provided on the understanding that you read and consent to be bound by the Terms and Conditions attached. For the purposes of this Agreement the “Data” comprise any of the spatial data and associated attribute data downloadable from the UNEP-WCMC website, excluding the World Database on Protected Areas.

  Read the data policy here

  Holdridge’s work aimed to correlate world plant formations with simple climatic data. The system embraces all major environmental factors in three hierarchical tiers.

   

  Level I - The Life Zone. This is determined by specific quantitative ranges of long-term average annual precipitation, mean annual biotemperature and potential evapotranspiration ratio. These are modified for montane systems.

  Level II - The "Association". This is an area of land which, under undisturbed conditions, supports a distinctive natural community adapted through evolution to a specific narrow range of atmospheric and edaphic conditions. No Association can occur in more than one Life Zone.

  Level III - The successional stage or cover type, which takes into account that the community may not be in its climax state, either through natural causes or through human intervention.

  Resource Type: Spatial Data / Maps
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  BIP National Biodiversity Indicators Portal »

  The National Biodiversity Indicators Portal is the leading resource for information on national biodiversity indicators. This portal is a companion website to the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (BIP), which provides indicator information at the global level.

  This website provides guidance and examples to support the development and effective use of biodiversity indicators. These capacity building resources are the product of more than five years of experience by UNEP-WCMC and the BIP. It is designed principally to support biodiversity indicators at the national level, but it is relevant for working from the local to global scales.
   

  Resource Type: Tools / Applications
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  Generalised Original and Current Forest (1998) »

  General Data License (excluding WDPA)

  Datasets Available from UNEP-WCMC: Excluding WDPA
  Access to UNEP-WCMC datasets is provided on the understanding that you read and consent to be bound by the Terms and Conditions attached. For the purposes of this Agreement the “Data” comprise any of the spatial data and associated attribute data downloadable from the UNEP-WCMC website, excluding the World Database on Protected Areas.

  Read the data policy here

  Global Generalised 'Original' Forest: This dataset, compiled from various sources at UNEP-WCMC, shows the original extent of global forest cover before human impact. It is divided into needle-leaf forest (NF), non-forest (NON), temperate, broadleaf and mixed forest (TBMF), tropical dry forest (TDF) and tropical moist forest (TMF). This dataset can be used with the dataset showing current forest cover to identify broad change.

  Global Generalised 'Current' Forest: This dataset, compiled from various sources at UNEP-WCMC, shows the current (1998) extent of global forest cover. It is divided into needle-leaf forest (NF), non-forest (NON), temperate, broadleaf and mixed forest (TBMF), tropical dry forest (TDF) and tropical moist forest (TMF). This general dataset of global forest cover was produced from a series of regional datasets containing more detailed information of the forest cover. This dataset can be used with the dataset showing original forest cover to identify broad change.
   

  Resource Type: Spatial Data / Maps
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  Mountains and Forests in Mountains (2000) »

  General Data License (excluding WDPA)

  Datasets Available from UNEP-WCMC: Excluding WDPA
  Access to UNEP-WCMC datasets is provided on the understanding that you read and consent to be bound by the Terms and Conditions attached. For the purposes of this Agreement the “Data” comprise any of the spatial data and associated attribute data downloadable from the UNEP-WCMC website, excluding the World Database on Protected Areas.

  Read the data policy here

  To provide a global context for a discussion of mountain forests, it is first necessary to define the locations and types of mountain forests, and this in turn requires a definition of mountains or mountain areas. Altitude and slope and the environmental gradients they generate are key components of such a definition, but their combination is problematic. Simple altitude thresholds both exclude older and lower mountain systems and include areas of relatively high elevation that have little topographic relief and few environmental gradients. Using slope as a criterion on its own or in combination with altitude can resolve the latter problem, but not the former. As a first step to evaluating global mountain forest resources and the threats to them, UNEP-WCMC (in collaboration with the Environmental Change Institute and kindly supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Co-operation - SDC) in 2000 made a first attempt to map the mountain forests of the world.
   

  Resource Type: Spatial Data / Maps
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  Global Coral Reef Distribution (2010) »

  General Data License (excluding WDPA)

  Datasets Available from UNEP-WCMC: Excluding WDPA
  Access to UNEP-WCMC datasets is provided on the understanding that you read and consent to be bound by the Terms and Conditions attached. For the purposes of this Agreement the “Data” comprise any of the spatial data and associated attribute data downloadable from the UNEP-WCMC website, excluding the World Database on Protected Areas.

  Read the data policy here

  The dataset contained in this map represents the global distribution of warm water coral reefs. It has been created from multiple sources and supercedes the dataset used in the World Atlas of Coral Reefs (2001), although some aspects of this product still originate from that datasource. This global coral reef dataset should be seen an 'interim' global product. It has been compiled from a number of data sources which have been merged together by UNEP-WCMC. The Approximate % coverage of data sources are as follows - Millennium Coral Reefs (Unvalidated) 50% - Millennium Coral Reefs (Validated) 30 % - Other sources 20%.

  Resource Type: Spatial Data / Maps
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  Knowledge for conservation-new technology, new players and a new approach »

  How may we improve the quality, accessibility and usefulness of data about the living world? Three examples present themselves: use of new technology to build capacity for biodiversity knowledge management in the developing world; engagement of new sources of data; and harmonization of official data deriving from inter-governmental biodiversity-related treaties.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  The Challenge of Measuring Global Change in Wild Nature: Are Things Getting Better or Worse? »

  We briefly review recent global trends in habitat area in as many broadly-defined natural habitats as possible, and in indices of animal populations characteristic of those habitats. The information available indicates continuing declines in habitat area and species, but those data are extremely sparse.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Mountains and Tree Cover in Mountain Regions (2002) »

  General Data License (excluding WDPA)

  Datasets Available from UNEP-WCMC: Excluding WDPA
  Access to UNEP-WCMC datasets is provided on the understanding that you read and consent to be bound by the Terms and Conditions attached. For the purposes of this Agreement the “Data” comprise any of the spatial data and associated attribute data downloadable from the UNEP-WCMC website, excluding the World Database on Protected Areas.

  Read the data policy here

  To provide a global context for a discussion of mountain forests, it is first necessary to define the locations and types of mountain forests, and this in turn requires a definition of mountains or mountain areas. Altitude and slope and the environmental gradients they generate are key components of such a definition, but their combination is problematic. Simple altitude thresholds both exclude older and lower mountain systems and include areas of relatively high elevation that have little topographic relief and few environmental gradients. Using slope as a criterion on its own or in combination with altitude can resolve the latter problem, but not the former. The mountains dataset shows the location of mountain land estimated from a digital elevation model using criteria based on elevation alone (the upper three classes: > 2 500 metres) and at lower elevation, on a combination of elevation, slope and local elevation range. This is an update of the Mountain's of the World 2000 and was produced for the UNEP-WCMC publication Mountain Watch, 2002.

  The mountains dataset has been overlayed with a global data set on percent tree cover taken from MODIS 1-km resolution percent tree cover data, courtesy of University of Maryland Global Land Cover Facility. Species richness, density and forest height tend to reduce with increasing altitude; the boundary between forest vegetation and more open ground cover at higher elevation 'the treeline' is an ecological marker signifying the transition to more extreme climatic conditions.

  Resource Type: Spatial Data / Maps