Bioclimatic indicators dataset for the orographically complex Canary Islands archipelago

Abstract

The Canary Islands are an archipelago of significant natural value, with a large variety of endemic species living in them, making essential the study of the effects of climate change. This research is based on the use of dynamic techniques of climatic regionalisation to obtain climate projections that contribute to the conservation of ecosystems in the Canary Islands. In this work, climate projections derived from WRF simulations with a spatial resolution of 3 km were used to obtain a novel dataset of 53 bioclimatic indicators, called BICI–ULL (Bioclimatic Indicators in the Canary Islands, University of La Laguna). The regional climate simulations were driven by three CMIP5 models (GFDL–ESM2M, IPSL–CM5A–MR, and MIROC–ESM) over three periods (1980–2009, 2030–2059, 2070–2099) and two emission scenarios (representative concentration pathway 4.5 and 8.5), to obtain, among others, the standard climatic variables used to generate the bioclimatic indicators: temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, humidity and wind speed.