Area of Habitat (AOH) is 'the habitat available to a species, that is, habitat within its range'. It complements a geographic range map for a species by showing potential occupancy and reducing commission errors. AOH maps are produced by subtracting areas considered unsuitable for the species from their range map, using information on each species' associations with habitat and elevation. We present AOH maps for 5,481 terrestrial mammal and 10,651 terrestrial bird species (including 1,816 migratory bird species for which we present separate maps for the resident, breeding, and non-breeding areas). Our maps have a resolution of 100 m. On average, AOH covered 66±28% of the range maps for mammals and 64±27% for birds. The AOH maps were validated independently, following a novel two-step methodology: a modeling approach to identify outliers and a species-level approach based on point localities. We used AOH maps to produce global maps of the species richness of mammals, birds, globally threatened mammals, and globally threatened birds.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 766417