News

GMBA releases new global mountain inventory

05.04.2022

The Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA), a long-standing member of the Mountain Partnership, has released a significantly updated and expanded version of its global mountain inventory, which now consists of 8616 mountain polygons.

Version 2.0 of the global mountain inventory introduces a hierarchical classification of the world’s mountain ranges, which allows for the partitioning of mountain systems into smaller ranges and subranges and enables spatially explicit and comparative mountain research across scales.

The construction of the mountain range polygons is the result of a semi-automated approach described in the Scientific Data journal article “A hierarchical inventory of the world’s mountains for global comparative mountain science”. In this approach, rivers form the borders between contiguous mountain ranges, and the outer borders of the mountain systems correspond to a new, more generalized mountain definition.

The inventory is available for unrestricted download as a series of geographic information system (GIS) shape files on the dedicated EarthEnv page. The files come in two main versions: ‘standard’, where the mountain extent corresponds to the new mountain definition, and ‘broad’, where the mountain extent encompasses all mountain definitions available on the Global Mountain Explorer. Both versions include a layer with all overlapping mountain ranges at different levels, a customized selection of major mountain systems, and a layer with only the smallest mapping units. Furthermore, both versions are associated to extensive attribute tables with information ranging from the polygon extent to the polygon’s name in various languages. Some of the information, including the full hierarchical path associated with each mapping unit and the unit’s Wikipedia link, is also displayed online.

In addition to the layers themselves, two tools are provided to explore and work with the downloadable GIS shape files. The R package gmbaR directly reads and loads the shape files from the internet for further analysis, and the Excel GMBA Selection Tool includes a visually attractive rendering of the entire hierarchical tree, showing the relationship between the 8616 mountain polygons included in the inventory.

“This new inventory enables the extraction of data such as human population and settlements as well as patterns of land-use change from spatial layers and the identification of areas of high versus moderate to low demographic pressure or demand for mountain-related goods and services for instance. It also enables the spatially-explicit hierarchical aggregation of data for analysis of and reporting on patterns in mountain social-ecological systems at different scales,” said Davnah Urbach of the GMBA. “It thereby represents an extremely useful tool for comparative mountain science and sustainable mountain development.”

The development of this new dataset is described in detail in a paper published on 1 April 2022 in Scientific Data.

News by the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment