SwissED II: Swiss Environmental Domains - Applications

Free to read on publisher's website Swiss Environmental Domains (SwissED) is an environmental classification of key climatic, geologic and topographic variables influencing both natural and anthropogenic processes at various scales. It represents a new spatial framework to analyse data about our environment (e.g. biodiversity, land cover, demography, agriculture, economical activities) that is not replacing existing ones but simply complementing them. SwissED was inspired from several similar initiatives developed in Australia, New Zealand, USA and Europe. It follows a quantitative and reproducible approach composed of two phases: i) first a non-hierarchical classification to group a sample of pixels representing Switzerland into a 120 domains, ii) second a hierarchical classification of these 120 domains into 100, 50, 25 or 10 domains. These domains can be coloured following the result of a PCA analysis where red corresponds to a gradient of temperature, green a gradient of calcareous content and blue a topography gradient. The first 10 domains were named according to their environmental characteristics: calcareous reliefs, molassic flats and hills, quaternary hills and valleys, crystalline slopes, dry quaternary flats, calcareous midslopes, calcareous upper slopes, crystalline crests, crystalline quaternary slopes and calcareous crests. SwissED represents the natural potential of the landscapes independently of human activities. It can serve therefore as spatial framework to analyse any environmental statistics according to classes that are defined based on environmental conditions. SwissED would be particularly well suited to represent sustainable development statistics based on the principle that the economy depends on the society, and the society depends itself on the environment. Examples from other countries and regions prove that SwissED can bring a new, complementary and useful spatial framework to underpin environmental research and management in Switzerland at various scales. Possible applications are …