# MOBI — Map of Biodiversity Importance: Species Richness (All Taxa)

**Source:** NatureServe
**Coverage:** Contiguous United States (CONUS)
**H3 resolution:** 8 (~0.74 km² per cell)
**Value range:** 0–32 species per cell

## Overview

The [Map of Biodiversity Importance (MOBI)](https://www.natureserve.org/map-biodiversity-importance) integrates NatureServe habitat models for ~2,400 imperiled and endemic species of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants across the contiguous US. This layer — **Species Richness (All Taxa)** — reports the number of modeled species with predicted suitable habitat. The H3 hex layer has ~7.7 million non-zero cells (≈10.5 million total cells including richness 0) across CONUS.

The source raster (990 m pixels) is published as a WGS84 Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF and aggregated to H3 resolution 8 hexagons by **area-weighted exact-extract with the `max` reducer**: each cell stores the *maximum* modeled richness among the source pixels covering it (one row per cell). `max` is used because richness is a count of species present — the peak, not an average — so rollups to coarser resolutions take `MAX`, preserving biodiversity hotspots.

## Data access

**H3 Hex Parquet** (Hive-partitioned by h0 cell):
```
https://s3-west.nrp-nautilus.io/public-mobi/mobi-species-richness-all/hex/h0=*/data_0.parquet
```

**Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF** (WGS84, for raster visualization via titiler / GDAL):
```
https://s3-west.nrp-nautilus.io/public-mobi/mobi-species-richness-all-cog.tif
```

### DuckDB example

```sql
INSTALL httpfs; LOAD httpfs;
SET s3_endpoint = 's3-west.nrp-nautilus.io';
SET s3_use_ssl = true;
SET s3_url_style = 'path';

-- Top 10 highest species-richness cells (one row per cell — no GROUP BY needed)
SELECT h8, species_richness
FROM read_parquet('s3://public-mobi/mobi-species-richness-all/hex/h0=*/data_0.parquet')
WHERE species_richness > 0
ORDER BY species_richness DESC
LIMIT 10;

-- Roll up to resolution 6: MAX-of-MAX preserves the hotspot (never AVG/SUM)
SELECT h6, MAX(species_richness) AS peak_richness
FROM read_parquet('s3://public-mobi/mobi-species-richness-all/hex/h0=*/data_0.parquet')
GROUP BY h6;
```

### Visualization

This is a raster-derived layer (COG + H3 hex; no PMTiles). For web maps, serve the
WGS84 COG through a tile server such as [titiler](https://developmentseed.org/titiler/),
or render the H3 cells directly from the Parquet (e.g. with `h3-js` + deck.gl
`H3HexagonLayer`, coloring by `species_richness`).

## Columns

| Column | Type | Description |
|--------|------|-------------|
| `species_richness` | float | Maximum modeled species richness among source pixels covering the cell (exact-extract `max`). One row per cell. Integer-valued, range 0–32. |
| `h8` | uint64 | H3 cell index at resolution 8 (native resolution) |
| `h7` | uint64 | H3 cell index at resolution 7 (rollup key) |
| `h6` | uint64 | H3 cell index at resolution 6 (rollup key) |
| `h5` | uint64 | H3 cell index at resolution 5 (rollup key) |
| `h0` | int64 | H3 cell index at resolution 0 (Hive partition key) |

## Citation

Hamilton, H., Smyth, R. L., Young, B. E., Howard, T. G., Tracey, C., Breyer, S., Cameron, D. R., Chazal, A., Conley, A. K., Frye, C., & Schloss, C. (2022). Increasing taxonomic diversity and spatial resolution clarifies opportunities for protecting US imperiled species. *Ecological Applications*, 32(3), e2534. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2534

**Partners:** NatureServe, Esri, The Nature Conservancy, state natural heritage programs (NY, VA, PA, CO, FL, OR, MT, MI, WY and others). Computational support from Microsoft AI for Earth.