Chorological data for the main European woody species

The data are organized as a set of ESRI shapefiles (*.shp, *.shx, *.dbf, *.prj files) mapping the distribution ranges of the main European tree and shrub species. For each species and in some cases subspecies, one or more shapefiles have been created containing: a) polygon features (name suffix “plg”), which define continuous areas of occupancy of the species range and b) point features (name suffix “pnt”), which identify more fragmented and isolated populations. For species with reported synanthropic occurrences outside the natural range, an additional point and/or polygon shapefile has also been created (suffix “syn”). The polygon borders delimiting the range have been generalized across the mainland and sea boundaries. Clipping to a specific coastline has been avoided, as this can vary considerably in its geometry depending on scale and precision of the respective source. This offers the possibility to mask sea areas, or to clip and extract the species’ terrestrial range parts using GIS data layers of the users’ choice. Finally, an accompanying text document is included with the data, which provides more details on methodology and a list of all mapped species with related file names, taxonomical delimitation of the mapped species and references used to compile the respective chorological dataset