This dataset documents the habitat suitability of European land systems for 1155 terrestrial vertebrate species, based on a novel land system classification of Europe that factors in land use intensity (Dou et al., 2021). This information can be used to refine species spatial distributions based on the known suitability of land use classes for species. This dataset also includes data on distance to water requirements for species that depend on water ecosystems for food or as habitat, as it is an additional information that is useful for refining species distributions. File structure and content: - habitatPreferences.csv contains a dataframe that documents the suitability of all land use classes (in columns) to serve as habitats for European terrestrial vertebrate species (in rows, with taxonomy information in the first columns). Land use classes are indicated in codes, and their meaning is found in the file LandUseCodesCorrespondance.csv. A value of 0 indicates unsuitability of the land use class to serve as habitat for the species; a value of 1 indicates suitable habitat; a value of 2 indicates optimal habitat. For some species, all habitats appear as suitable when either no information on the ecology was available, or when the EOO was so small that no further refinement of their range is relevant (following on Maiorano et al., 2013). - LandUseCodesCorrespondance.csv contains the correspondance between the land use class codes (in the HabitatPreferences.csv file) and their meaning. - DistWater.csv documents the distance from water (m) that is suitable for water-dependent species (in rows).- OUTPUT contains AOH maps for terrestrial vertebrate species in Europe for which there is available information on the geographic range and habitat preferences. - script.R contains the code for creating the habitat suitability table and AOH maps.