11 November 2011: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Data Portal has contributed to a study of over 300,000 mammal records from the US to assess the importance of climate and land cover on species presence at various scales. The study’s authors suggest that these findings are critical to understanding how to design protected area policies and wildlife corridors.

Through the use of the mammal data accessed through the GBIF Data Portal, Israeli scientists mapped records of species in the US against a environmental variables at 10 spatial scales. In the paper published in PloS One, they suggest that at the larger scale and coarser resolution, climate is the biggest factor influencing the composition of mammal species communities, while land use and land cover, such as human uses and natural vegetation types, become increasingly important at smaller scales and higher resolution. The study highlights that, over larger areas, temperature and rainfall determine which species are present, while at the local scale, species composition is influenced more by the presence of forest, urban development, agriculture and other variables in land use and cover. [GBIF Press Release]