PALEO-PGEM-Series: A spatial time series of the global climate over the last 5 million years (Plio-Pleistocene)

Motivation: Climate change plays an important role in the generation and maintenance of biodiversity by driving processes such as diversification and range shifts. As a result, biodiversity patterns are often found to carry the imprints of palaeoclimatic changes. However, we still know little about the spatial and temporal variation in climate over the scale of millennia affecting eco-evolutionary dynamics, mostly because of the scarcity of user-friendly and freely available spatio-temporal palaeoclimate series at such temporal scales. Here, we address this gap by presenting PALEO-PGEM-Series, a global spatio-temporal dataset of the last 5 Myr, with 1 kyr resolution, spatially downscaled from emulations performed with the intermediate-complexity atmosphere-ocean general circulation model PALEO-PGEM. PALEO- PGEM-Series holds the potential to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind the strong relationship between biodiversity and climate, a pressing need given projected biodiversity responses to anthropogenic climatic change. Main Types of Variables Contained: Spatio-temporal series of monthly temperature and precipitation and 17 derived bioclimatic variables over the Pliocene-Pleistocene, along with standard error estimates from multiple runs of the emulator. Spatial Location and Grain: Global landmasses, at 1 degrees x 1 degrees. Time Period and Grain: Last 5 Myr at 1000 year resolution. Major Taxa and Level of Measurement: Not applicable. Software Format: Tab-delimited text files and accompanying R code to derive bioclimatic variables.