Climate-limited vegetation change in the conterminous United States of America

<p>In the study "CLIMATE-LIMITED VEGETATION CHANGE IN THE CONTERMINOUS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA", published in the Global Change Biology journal, we evaluated the effects of climate conditions on vegetation composition and distribution in the conterminous United States (CONUS). To disentangle the direct effects of climate change from different non-climate factors, we applied "Liebig's law of the minimum" in a geospatial context, and determined the climate-limited potential for tree, shrub, herbaceous, and non-vegetation fractional cover change. We then compared these potential rates against observed change rates for the period 1986 to 2018 to identify areas of the CONUS where vegetation change is likely being limited by climatic conditions. This dataset contains the input and the resulting rasters for the study which include a) the observed rates of vegetation change, b) the climate derived potential vegetation rates of change, c) the difference between potential and observed values and d) the identified climatic limiting factor.</p>