ATLANTIC SPATIAL: a dataset of landscape, topographic, hydrological and anthropogenic metrics for the Atlantic Forest

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 as it regulates the underlying processes affecting the distribution and dynamics of species and communities. It is a fundamental factor when we consider the rapid climate 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 is among the global biodiversity hotspots because of its high species richness and endemism. Most of the threats to the Atlantic Forest 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 extent of the Atlantic Forest for the year 2020. The spatial data consider different vegetation classes (forest and forest plus other non-forest vegetation), effects of linear structure (roads and railways), and spatial metrics computed at multiple scales (radius buffer—moving window sizes—from 50 m to 2,500 m and up to 10 km for some metrics). The entire data set consists of the Atlantic Forest delimitation vector and over 500 rasters, available through a series of thematically grouped files in multiple Zenodo repositories. It is also possible to access this data set using the R package atlanticr, which we developed to facilitate the organization and acquisition of the data from Zenodo. The data set consists of a set of landscape, topographic, hydrological and anthropogenic metrics. The landscape metrics were calculated for two vegetation classes—Forest Vegetation (forest cover classes combined) and Natural Vegetation (forest and non-forest cover classes combined), and for a heterogeneous, multi-class classification of the landscape, with 31 land cover classes. The landscape metrics include: landscape morphology (classification as matrix, core, edge, corridor, branch, stepping stone, and perforation), fragment area and proportion, patch area and number of patches, edge and core areas and proportion, structural and functional connectivity (for different organisms’ gap-crossing capabilities), distance from and to fragment edges, fragment perimeter and perimeter-area ratio, and landscape diversity (heterogeneity). 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. Anthropogenic metrics contain the original maps of roads, railways, protected areas, indigenous territories, and quilombola territories (Afro-Brazilian traditional communities descended from enslaved Africans who resisted slavery), and the respective distances to each of them. This data set can allow efficient integration of biodiversity and spatially explicit data for the Atlantic Forest in future research and serve as a reference and data source for research, landscape planning, biodiversity conservation, and forest restoration programs.