Potential Natural Vegetation

Quoted from EarthStat's data description:

We derive a global map of natural vegetation at a 5 min resolution classified into 15 vegetation types. This data set is derived mainly from the DISCover land cover data set, with the regions dominated by land use filled using the vegetation data set of Haxeltine and Prentice. Thus our natural vegetation data set is consistently derived from the same source-the DISCover data-as our croplands data set. This data set does not necessarily represent the world’s natural pre-agricultural vegetation. Rather, it is representative of the world’s “potential” vegetation (i.e., vegetation that would most likely exist now in the absence of human activities). In regions not dominated by human land use, our vegetation types are those currently observed from a satellite. This differs from pre-settlement natural vegetation to the extent that vegetation types have changed because of changing environmental conditions such as climate and CO2 concentrations.