Natural habitat % — baseline 2015 (LUH2)
This layer maps the share of natural habitat per cell in 2015 from the LUH2 historical reconstruction, a land-use context layer.
Source: Land-Use Harmonization 2 (LUH2) Year: 2015 Category: Scenario · Natural habitat (LUH2) Format: Raster grid (COG), native 0.25° Used in risk analysis: Context only. The layer carries no level or state tag for Resilience.
What it shows
This layer shows the percentage of each cell covered by natural habitat in 2015. It is the 2015 baseline of the LUH2 natural-habitat family, whose change by 2035, 2050 and 2080 is the Natural-habitat shock (LUH2).
The Resilience risk pages list a different layer as the Habitats level they show today: Natural habitat % — baseline 2024 (LUH3). See for example Loss of biological control.
How it is built
The value is the share of natural habitat from the LUH2 historical reconstruction for 2015. Natural habitat is primary plus secondary vegetation, forested and non-forested.
How to read it
Values run from 0 to 100 %. A higher value means more natural habitat remains.
"Natural habitat" here means the absence of human land use. It does not measure whether a functioning ecosystem is present. Deserts therefore score near the top: the Sahara, Libya and the Arabian Peninsula read as largely intact while holding no canopy, wetland or mangrove. Read this layer as land-use context, not as a proxy for ecosystem condition.
Source
Land-Use Harmonization 2 (LUH2), University of Maryland. Hurtt et al. (2020), Geoscientific Model Development.
Related pages: Natural-habitat shock (LUH2), Shock layers.
Legend
Symbolised field: Natural habitat (%), a ten-colour ramp from 0 to 100.
Generated from darwin/layers/layer-luh2-natural-habitat-historical-2015.toml (develop).