Species & Habitat

Species & Habitat is a terraPulse dataset that maps where species can live. It is aimed at wildlife management: as terraPulse puts it, improving the health and connectivity of ecosystems across public and private land requires landscape-scale information.

For each of hundreds of species, terraPulse maps the spatial distribution of the species' environmental niche and/or spectral characteristics. Each map combines available records of species abundance or occurrence with coincident values of environmental predictors drawn from the terraPulse data cube, a record of ecosystem cover, structure and function mined from satellite measurements with machine learning. The standard product, Habitat Suitability, gives the probability of occurrence given vegetation and terrain. Depending on data availability, maps reach up to 10-metre resolution across the species' entire range, cover 1984 to the present, and are updated up to daily. Certainty is reported as root-mean-square error. A published example maps white-tailed deer habitat suitability month by month across the conterminous United States.

terraPulse data are delivered by SFTP, through the terraServe API (GeoJSON, CSV, SHP or TIFF) and in the terraView dashboard, and map layers can be viewed as XYZ tiles in ArcGIS, QGIS, Leaflet or OpenLayers. terraPulse positions its habitat and corridor maps for identifying conservation priorities, analysing ecological potential, monitoring degradation and encroachment into protected habitat, tracking restoration and assessing recreation value. Wildlife users it names include the Idaho Department of Fish & Game (predicting deer and elk populations) and the Nevada Department of Wildlife (monitoring pronghorn habitat).