The database compiled for the Braun-Blanquet project is a compilation of various national and regional vegetation databases. The maintenance of these databases is in principle in the hands of the custodians. However, before uploading the databases into Braun-Blanquet database a quality check is performed by Alterra and Masaryk University. If possible, detected errors are corrected and reported back to the data provider. For the modelling of the habitat suitability map the Maxent software is used (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~schapire/maxent/). The grid values in the map represent the probability (ranging from 0-1) that the cell is suitable for the habitat.

The grid file represents the habitat suitability of the EUNIS type. For the modelling the widely used software Maxent for maximum entropy modelling of species’ geographic distributions was used. Maxent is a general-purpose machine-learning method with a simple and precise mathematical formulation, and has a number of aspects that make it well-suited for species distribution modelling when only presence (occurrence) data but not absence data are available (Philips et al. 2006). Because EUNIS habitats have a particular species composition, they are assumed to respond to specific ecological requirements, allowing us to generate correlative estimates of geographic distributions. Modelling habitats that have been floristically defined is a well-known procedure for ecological modelling at local scales, and a promising technique to be applied also at the continental level.

The Maxent method considers presence data (known observations of a given entity) and the so-called background data. Background data comprise a set of points used to describe the environmental variation of the study area according to the available environmental layers. It is assumed that these layers represent well the most important ecological gradients on a European scale. As layers the following environmental parameters have been used: Potential Evapotranspiration, Topsoil pH, Solar radiation, Temperature Seasonality (standard deviation *100), Mean Temperature of Wettest Quarter, Annual Precipitation, Precipitation Seasonality (Coefficient of Variation), Precipitation of Warmest Quarter & Distance to water (rivers, lakes, sea) and the RS-EBV's (Remote Sensing-enabled Essential Biodiversity Variables) Inundation; occurrence, Phenology; End of Season (day number), Phenology; Length of season (days), Phenology; Low of season (day number), Phenology; NDVI mean, Phenology; NDVI seasonality, Phenology; Peak of season (day number), Phenology; Start of Season (day number), Vegetation height (m); Population density.

For more information on the RS-EBV's see https://www.synbiosys.alterra.nl/nextgeoss/docs/Description_Abiotic_and_RSEBVs.pdf

More information on the generation of the spatial files is provided in the documents available for download together with the dataset.