Data Access

Species Conservation Landscape outputs (SCL) are freely accessible, and the code to generate them is fully open source, because we support the transparency and reproducibility of Open Science. It also helps conservation.

Of all input data, only the species observations themselves are not openly available, as there are various sensitivities including conservation concerns related to wildlife trafficking, as well as the intellectual property rights of those who gathered the data. In lieu of this, we have provided a list of all data sources used, along with the associated publications or individuals. If you would like to provide your data to the Act Green project, please contact Dr. Gautam Surya at gsurya@wcs.org.

Data are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial_ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Please cite this paper in all uses.

Github

For the tiger models, all calculations are based on a common task framework written in Python and making heavy use of the Earth Engine API. Each task is a separate Git repository hosted under a GPL 3.0 license on GitHub, inheriting from a common set of classes Docker container maintained in task_base. READMEs and code is fully accessible at the link below.

For the other three species, the majority of the code was written and implemented in Google Earth Engine, without utilizing the Earth Engine API. The final step of landscape classification based on observation data for jaguar and lion was written and implemented in R; bison classification is far less complicated, as there is virtually no uncertainty regarding the status of truly wild, unfenced bison herds.

Google Earth Engine

SCL calculations are performed within the task framework referenced below, with Google Earth Engine at its core. Earth Engine is a Cloud-based framework that combines a multi-petabyte catalog of Earth Observation data from NASA and other sources with a powerful geospatial analysis API. SCL outputs are stored in an ImageCollection at projects/SCL/v1/, with subdirectories by species (e.g. ../Panthera_tigris). Landscape assets available in the ../canonical/pothab directory by landscape type and timepoint or by following the link below.

Outside Google Earth Engine

For those without GEE access, SCL assets are exported as GeoJSON files and ESRI Shapefiles for each time point. Note that there is a slightly different field naming structure because of limits on shapefile fieldname lengths.

SCL Data Files

Select the species and year to downalod.