SEDAC has an ongoing interest in distributing data relevant to the biodiversity conservation community. This page provides links to our conservation data sets.

Central American Vegetation/Land Cover Classification and Conservation Status: This is a spatial data product, available in ESRI shapefile format, that provides an assessment of the degree to which both existing and proposed terrestrial protected area networks protect/would protect landscape-level biodiversity.

Environmental Performance Index (EPI): The EPI is a composite index focused on country performance against internationally accepted targets. The biodiversity and habitat portion of the EPI assesses country performance in protecting biomes and a variety of critical habitats.

Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI): The ESI is a composite index tracking a diverse set of environmental, socioeconomic, and institutional indicators that characterize and influence environmental sustainability at the national scale. Available for download in tabular format, the ESI includes a number of variables and indicators that represent national-level performance on biodiversity conservation.

Human Footprint and Last of the Wild (v.2): The Human Footprint represents the degree of human impact on the environment on a 1-kilometer global grid. The Last of the Wild represents the inverse of the Human Footprint - the biomes that are still relatively intact owing to their distance from major population centers and infrastructure.

Population, Landscape, and Climate Estimates II (PLACE v.2): The PLACE data set permits easy comparisons across countries on such measures as the number of persons living within different biomes and the percent area in different biomes. The data set includes estimates of national-level aggregations of population and area for the following thematic areas: 1) biome; 2) climate; 3) coastal proximity; 4) elevation; and 5) population density.

Species Grids: This Web site provides a search facility for quickly locating and downloading 1-kilometer (30 arc-second) resolution grids of the distribution of species. Data are available for global amphibian distributions, and for birds and mammals in the Americas. SEDAC provides individual species distribution grids, along with family grids that show the density and distribution of species within a given family.