While J-Earth contains exceptionally comprehensive and high resolution satellite-derived data and imagery, there exists the need for this tool to include geographic data products from the forefront studies and projects lead by international universities and organizations. Several of these global datasets have recently been acquired for addition into J-Earth; many of which also contain a temporal dimension which when ingested into J-Earth, make this a unique and powerful tool for spatial analysis.
The climate datasets include maximum, minimum and mean temperature as well as precipitation (shown below) coverage of the entire globe with a spatial resolution of I kilometer. The “current” climate data are interpolations of observed data from 1950 to 2000. The “future” climate data are output products from HadGEM1 for 2050 under the SRES-A1b emissions scenario (ccafs-climate.org). Both products contain full data for all 12 months of the year.
October precipitation in Southeast Asia (screen capture from J-Earth
The political boundaries for five administrative levels have also been added to J-Earth. This dataset includes the polygons of continents, countries (shown above), provinces, states, counties, municipalities, districts as well as attribute tables with information collected from census reports, the World Bank, and the United Nations.
Also included in J-Earth are the gridded population counts and density (shown below) datasets from the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). Like the climate datasets, these also have a temporal dimension; both counts and density data span from 1990 to 2015. Future estimates are projected from the spatial and population input data used to construct the Gridded Population of the World version 3 (GPWv3) (CIESIN and CIAT, 2005) . Other additions from SEDAC include global coverage datasets of settlements and urban extents. These datasets will aid J-Earth users in defining a geographic area of interest to which other datasets may be queried against.
Gridded population density data of Europe (screen capture from J-Earth
The data product from the Global Land Cover 2000 Project has also been added to J-Earth. This dataset (shown below) was used to provide information to the International Conventions on Climate Change, the Convention to Combat Desertification, the Ramsar Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment. This dataset is a main input for the latter to define the boundaries of the different ecosystems such as forest, grassland, wetlands, and cultivated systems. Ingested into J-Earth, this dataset may be used as a tool for users to analyze both global and regional ecologic systems.
Global Land Cover
Source: Global Environment Monitoring Unit
Spatial data of the Red List of Threatened Species has been acquired for addition into J-Earth from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This spatial data collection provided in J-Earth includes species distributions from some of the most comprehensively assessed taxonomic groups such as amphibians, mammals (shown below), birds, reptiles, and mangroves. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species uses a set of criteria to evaluate the extinction risk of thousands of species and subspecies in all regions of the world and is recognized as the most authoritative guide to the status of biological diversity.
Threatened mammal richness (number of species)
Source: IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
Documentation for the above mentioned datasets can be found at the following links:
climate datasets: http://www.worldclim.org
population and urban datasets: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu
boundaries: http://www.gadm.org
land cover: http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu
IUCN Red List: http://www.iucnredlist.org
