BioScore 2 - Plants & Mammals: background and pre-processing of distribution data

This report highlights the background and pre-processing of the distribution of plant species, habitats and mammal species. For plants a selection of about 900 taxa has been made, based on 45 Annex I habitat types, which represent a substantial part of European natural and semi-natural vegetation. For animals all species existing in Europe have been taken into account. The data covers more or less all EU28 countries and is pre-processed in three steps to feed the BioScore 2 model. In the first step for each species or habitat type a climate/soil model has been created by using Boosted Regression Models (GBM). On the basis of these models presence/absence maps are derived to define the distribution range of the species/habitat types. In the second step additional knowledge was brought in to further specify the potential habitat within the distribution range, by laying an explicit mask over it, selecting only those land use types (land cover classes) suitable for the occurrence of the habitat type or species. In the third step the effect of human-induced pressures on habitat quality and species occurrence/abundance within the suitable habitats in the calculated distribution ranges was taken into account. The dose-effect relations were calculated on the basis of Generalized Linear Models (GLM). All outcomes of the three steps have been further used by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) to set up the BioScore 2 model.