The Status and Conservation of the Alpine Lynx Population (SCALP) was created in the early 1990s to survey the status of the lynx in the Alps, carry out monitoring activities in coordination between Alpine countries and close research gaps in the region. The project brings together a team of experts focused on compiling available data on lynx and standardising their interpretation. SCALP has not only been compiling data required for the description of the conservation status of the lynx population in the Alps, but has also been advancing the conceptual and methodological approach of transboundary monitoring with the SCALP criteria. The SCALP criteria classify species occurrence data according to their verifiability (i.e. C1 = hard fact data, C2 = verified records, C3 = unverified records or records which by their nature cannot be verified) and are now commonly used in several species. Thanks to the standardised data interpretation, direct comparison of lynx distribution between countries and populations is possible. Lynx presence was mapped at a 10 x 10 km (ETRS89-LAEA Europe) grid scale. This grid is widely used for Habitat Directive reporting to the European Union (EU) and can be downloaded at: [http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/eea-reference-grids-2].

Since 2013, SCALP has been expanded to include additional countries in Europe and renamed to SCALP+. Here, we provide the shp files of SCALP+ for data collected between May 1 2022 and April 30 2023 from Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland. The shp files visualise the distribution of lynx in the respective countries, core areas of populations (where reproduction occurs) and variation in underlaying data quality.