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”). Polygon borders delimiting species ranges are generalized across the mainland and sea boundaries. This offers the possibility to mask sea areas or to clip and extract the terrestrial range parts using GIS data layers of the users' choice. An additional version of polygon ranges are clipped with a coastline (name suffix “clip”), which have been derived from Natural Earth dataset "Admin 0 - Countries" 1:50M version 4.1.0 (https://www.naturalearthdata.com). 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