Land Suitability for forests

Indicators of bioclimatic conditions and forest suitability This dataset provides information on the current and future (medium-term horizon) land suitability for 20 Mediterranean forest species. The dataset, covering the entire Italian territory, was produced by applying the Species Distribution Modeling (SDM) approach in particular using the MAXENT machine learning algorithm. Starting from the current distribution of forest species based on spatial data from the Italian National Inventory (INFC), the MAXENT model was calibrated using 19 Bioclimatic Indicators derived from the VHR-REA_IT dataset in the period 1991-2020 (current); afterwards maps of future land suitability projections for the 20 forest species were produced using the same 19 Bioclimatic indicators recalculated for the period 2021-2050 using the bias-corrected VHR-PRO_IT dataset. The Bioclimatic Indicators were calculated in SAGA-GIS (https://saga-gis.sourceforge.io/saga_tool_doc/6.4.0/climate_tools_10.html) as defined by Worldclim according to the definitions given by Jeremy van der Wal (https://rdrr.io/github/jjvanderwal/climates/man/bioclim.html).