Biological reserves of the US Federal Protection Network (IUCN categories I-IV) and PCA loadings used to characterize the climate space of the conterminous United States

This data publication contains a map of biological reserves, in the conterminous United States (US), larger than 500 hectares managed by four US federal agencies: Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fishand Wildlife Service (FWS), Forest Service (FS), and National Parks Service (NPS). Within such US Federal Protection Network, only federal areas in conservation classifications corresponding to The World Conservation Union categories I to IV (IUCN 1994) are included. These categories include designated, candidate, and officially recommended wilderness areas; forest reserves; natural areas and landmarks; wildlife refuges; cooperative management and protection areas; and national parks, preserves, monuments, and conservation areas. This data publication also includes maps of the loadings of the first three axes of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) used to characterize the climate space of the conterminous United States of America (CONUS). The PCA was performed using climate variables depicting annual and seasonal trends in temperature, precipitation, moisture index, relative humidity, as well as growing degree days and growing season length.
These data were used within a quantitative classification that stratified the climatic variability of the conterminous United States to (a) evaluate the characteristics and rarity of the climate in federally managed areas, (b) determine cases where climate is not well represented by the network of protected federal land (i.e., a climate gap analysis).
Original metadata date was 06/24/2014. Minor metadata updates on 12/13/2016.