Uncovering Climate Resilient Traits Through Ecological Niche Modeling of Cocoyam and Taro Wild Relatives Across Africa

The present dataset consists of training data, output files, and a project summary poster generated from environmental niche modelling (ENM) analyses of 68 crop wild relatives of taro (Colocasia esculenta) and cocoyam (Xanthosoma sagittifolium). Each component is seperated by crop and are provided to ensure reproducibility and further research on ecological modelling and biogeographic analyses.  Xanthosoma & Colocasia Raw and Cleaned Data Format: CSV Contents: Raw data consists of original species occurrence records obtained from GBIF and iDigBio. These records include coordinates, taxonomic information, and associated metadata. No filtering or cleaning was applied beyond the initial data download. Cleaned data consists of records retained after data cleaning and spatial filtering. Records were examined for coordinate validity, spatial precision, and duplication, and further filtered to reduce sampling bias where applicable (e.g. spatial thinning). These data represent the final presence points used in model calibration and evaluatio Xanthosoma & Colocasia Pearson Correlation Matrices for Environmental Layers Format: CSV Contents: Pairwise Pearson correlation coefficients calculated among environmental predictor variables for each species.  Xanthosoma & Colocasia Current Crop and Crop Wild Relative Projections Format: GeoTIFF (.tif) Contents: Raster projections representing current habitat suitability for the species, as estimated by ENMs calibrated using present-day environmental variables within Africa. The GeoTIFF files contain continuous values indicating relative suitability across the modelled region. Botany 2025 Poster Format: PDF (.pdf) Contents: Overview of ENM project including background, workflow, results, and future directions.