update endangered species layer

[12rambau]

Hi all,

Let’s use Clinton Jenkins’s data, which were originally published in PNAS in 2013 but have been updated since then. Clinton works closely with one of my colleagues and collaborators, Stuart Pimm, and one of Stuart’s former PhD students, Lucas Joppa, who is Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Officer. I doubt we can find a data source with a stronger scientific pedigree.

Clinton has generated 10x10 km global maps of numbers of threatened species of amphibians, birds, and mammals per grid cell. He describes the maps here:
https://biodiversitymapping.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Methods_and_Permissions_BiodiversityMapping_15December2018.pdf
He makes them available for download here:
https://biodiversitymapping.org/index.php/download/
I’ve attached a zip file with GeoTIFFs/shapefiles that I downloaded from that site.

The file contains three subfolders, one each for amphibians, birds, and mammals. Each subfolder contains multiple maps. We should use the ones that give numbers of threatened species, which are at the bottom of the subfolder directories. We will need to sum the numbers of threatened species across the three maps to generate the grand total number of threatened species.

I hope these maps solve our biodiversity data problem.

Jeff