A suite of global, cross-scale topographic variables for environmental and biodiversity modeling, links to files in GeoTIFF format

A fully standardized and global multivariate product of different terrain features has the potential to support many large-scale basic research and analytical applications, however to date, such datasets are unavailable. Here we used the digital elevation model products of global 250 m GMTED2010 and near-global 90m SRTM4.1dev to derive a suite of topographic variables: elevation, slope, aspect, eastness, northness, roughness, terrain roughness index, topographic position index, vector ruggedness measure, profile/tangential curvature, first/second order partial derivative, and 10 geomorphological landform classes.

We aggregated each variable to 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 km spatial grains using several aggregation approaches. While a cross-correlation underlines the high similarity of many variables, a more detailed view in four mountain regions reveals local differences, as well as scale variations in the aggregated variables at different spatial grains.