Maurício Humberto Vancine , Bernardo Brandão Niebuhr, Renata L. Muylaert, Júlia Emi de Faria Oshima, Vinicius Tonetti, Rodrigo Bernardo, Rafael Souza Cruz Alves, Eduardo Miguel Zanette, Victor Casagrande Souza, João Gabriel Ribeiro Giovanelli, Carlos Henrique Grohmann, Mauro Galetti, Milton Cezar Ribeiro

Space is one of the main drivers of biodiversity, once it regulates the underlying processes affecting the distribution and dynamics of species and communities. It is a fundamental factor in the face of the rapid climate and land use and land cover changes at local and global scales, which are linked to habitat loss and fragmentation and their impacts on various organisms. The Atlantic Forest of South America (AF) is among the global biodiversity hotspots because of its high species richness and endemism. Most of the threats to the AF biodiversity are due to the expansion of urbanization and industry, extensive agricultural and livestock production, and mining. Here, we make available integrated and fine-scale spatial information (resolution = 30 m) for the entire AF extent for the year 2020. The metrics consider different vegetation classes (forest and forest plus other natural vegetation), effects of linear structure (roads and railways), and multiple scales (radius buffer from 50 m to 2,500 m and up to 10 km for some metrics). The entire data set consists of over 500 rasters and the AF delimitation vector, available through the R package atlanticr, which we developed to facilitate the organization and acquisition of the data. The metrics consist of land cover (31 classes), distance to grouped land cover classes (forest vegetation, natural vegetation, pasture, temporary crop, perennial crop, forest plantation, urban areas, mining, and water), a set of landscape, topographic and hydrological metrics, and anthropogenic infrastructure. The landscape metrics include landscape morphology (classification as matrix, core, edge, corridor, stepping stone, branch, and perforation), fragment area and proportion, area and number of patches, edge and core areas and proportion, structural and functional connectivity (for different organisms’ gap-crossing capabilities), distance to fragment edges, fragment perimeter and perimeter-area ratio, and landscape diversity. Topographic metrics include elevation, slope, aspect, curvatures, and landform elements (peak, ridge, shoulder, spur, slope, hollow, footslope, valley, pit, and flat). Hydrological metrics comprise potential springs and their kernel density, and potential streams and their respective distances, and anthropogenic infrastructure maps contain roads, railways, protected areas, indigenous territories, and quilombola territories, and the respective distances to each of them. This data set will allow efficient integration of biodiversity and environmental data for the AF in future research, and we might be an important reference and data source for landscape planning, biodiversity conservation, and forest restoration programs.