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The WTEs were conceptualized and delineated as areas with unique combinations of climate setting, landforms, and vegetation/land cover. The WTEs were produced from a spatial combination of three input datalayers; World Climate Regions (eighteen classes produced from thirty years of WorldClim v. 2.0 temperature and precipitation data), World Landforms (four classes (plains, hills, mountains, and tablelands) produced from a DEM-derived global Hammond landforms layer), and World Vegetation/Land Cover (8 classes produced from 2015 European Space Agency global land cover data). The work produced 431 WTEs, including both ‘natural’ ecosystems (e.g. different kinds of forests, shrublands, grasslands, bare areas, etc.) and ‘converted’ landscapes (e.g. croplands, settlements). The full methodological details on how the WTEs were developed, as well as the results of a gap analysis detailing the representation of WTEs in global protected areas, is presented in: Roger Sayre, Deniz Karagulle, Charlie Frye, Timothy Boucher, Nicholas H. Wolff, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Madeline Martin, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Jerry Touval, Leonardo Sotomayor, Jennifer McGowan, Edward T. Game, Hugh Possingham, An assessment of the representation of ecosystems in global protected areas using new maps of World Climate Regions and World Ecosystems, Global Ecology and Conservation, Volume 21, 2020, e00860, ISSN 2351-9894, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2019.e00860. |