These maps were produced by combining numerous and heterogeneous data collected from atlas monographs providing complete species distribution maps, from national to regional atlases, occurrence geo-databases, scientific and grey literature. The maps were created using ESRI shapefiles (*.shp, *.shx, *.dbf, *.prj files) archived in the ZIP file. Species range is mapped with polygon features (name suffix "plg"), which define continuous areas of occupancy of the species, and with point features (name suffix "pnt"), which identify more fragmented and isolated populations. If synanthropic occurrences are reported outside the species natural range, additional point and/or polygon shapefiles are also present (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).
Please cite as: Caudullo, G., Welk, E., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., 2017. Chorological maps for the main European woody species. Data in Brief 12, 662-666. DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2017.05.007
Additional information and used references are on 'supplementary materials' document: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5091901
Chorological maps are part of the "European Atlas of Forest Tree Species" project: https://w3id.org/mtv/FISE-Comm/v01