2025/11/06 by Antoine Adde, Pierre‐Louis Rey, Nathan Külling +13 · 2 voices · 1 citation
Environmental Science · #Species Distribution and Climate Change #Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies #Wildlife-Road Interactions and Conservation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41597-025-06037-x
Conserving natural ecosystems requires consistent and standardized biodiversity data to advance scientific research and ecological understanding. Despite several national initiatives to develop databases of species habitat suitability maps, even well-studied countries often lack comprehensive, standardized databases that cover a wide range of taxonomic groups modelled using a consistent framework. Using Switzerland as a case study, we demonstrate how these gaps can be addressed by introducing SDMapCH (v1.3), a nationwide raster database of species habitat suitability maps at 25-meter resolution. SDMapCH provides maps for about 7,500 species under both present conditions and future climate scenarios. SDMapCH was developed using the N-SDM software, an end-to-end platform based on a spatially-nested hierarchical framework. N-SDM allows multi-level integration of species and covariate data, helping to address niche truncation. SDMapCH outputs were evaluated using a state-of-the-art cross-validation procedure, and all layers passed a systematic data integrity check. By providing standardized, high-resolution habitat suitability maps for diverse species across various taxonomic and functional groups, SDMapCH stands as a key resource for scientific research and biodiversity assessments.