1 Terminology and acronyms

Athough all georeferenced data can be considered geodata, in this material we use the following terms in the order listed below in our workflows:

  • raw geodata - considered as raw data obtained for a harmonised description of the environment. This may include tables with coordinates, raster or vector data. It can be anything that has been or can be used to create ecogeographical variables, with or without slight processing.

  • geodata product - processed raw geodata that have undegone heavy modifications, e.g.  spatial overlays and combinations of different sets of raw geodata, and are used as input data. In this document, geodata products are categorical raster layers that match the CRS and the pixel locations of input data. When split by categories, they become input data. The processing step of creating geodata products is necessary when decisions about the order of spatial overlays are important. For example, in a high-resolution pixel, there can only be water or forest, if the edge between water and forest need to be calculated.

  • input data or input layers - very-high resolution (multiple times higher than that used for ecogeographical variables) raster data that are the direct input for the creation of most of the ecogeographical variables. The creation of such layers is particularly useful alongside geodata products, as dealing with border misalignment or decisions regarding the order of spatial overlays, as well as simple geoprocessing, is much faster with raster data.

  • ecogeographical variables (EGVs) - this is the final product of the workflow describing environment for statistical analysis (e.g. species distribution modelling). They are suitable also for publishing due to standadisation of the values. In other words, these are standardised landscape ecological variables in the for of high-resolution raster layers (we use 1 ha cells). Each layer contains values representing the environment within the cell footprint or a summary of focal neighbours. In our case, each layer is of quantitative data describing a natural quantity (e.g. timber volume, mean annual temperature), or quantified information of categories (e.g. the fraction of class’s area in an analysis cell or some neighbourhood, the number of pixels creating an edge of a certain class or between two classes in the analysis cell or some neighbourhood). The values of each layer are standardised - from every cells value layers mean is subtracted and then every cells value is divided by layers root mean square error. Therefore, the values are more suitable for modelling, and the layers can be made publicly available as they do not directly provide exact sensitive information.

In this material, we use the term species distribution modelling as a more used term, that is synonymous with ecological niche analysis and ecological niche modelling.

Acronyms:

CRS - coordinate reference system

EGV - ecogeoraphical variables

SDM - species distribution modelling

SDMs - species distribution models

LAD - Rural support service

NDMI - normalized difference moisture index

NDVI - normalized difference vegetation index

NDWI - normalized difference water index

MVR - State Forest Service’s stand level inventory database “Forest State Registry”

VMD - State Forest Service