The Habitat Map of Switzerland v1_2 2025

Description

Lebensraumkarte der Schweiz v1.2 2025/La carte des milieux naturels de Suisse v1.2 2025 The FOEN funded project ‘The Habitat Map of Switzerland:continual improvement’ conducted at the WSL, has improved on versions 1.0 and 1.1 of a map of Swiss habitats according to the TypoCH classification (Delarze et al. 2015). The datasets is now separated into two data sets: The Habitat Map of Switzerland v1.2, ground cover layer, and The Habitat Map of Switzerland v1.2, individual trees and shrubs outside forest v1.0 (above ground) layer. The Habitat Map of Switzerland maps the TypoCH habitat types wall-to-wall across the whole of Switzerland, to at least the classification’s 2nd level of detail (where possible to the 3rd level of detail). Habitats are mapped through a variety of approaches that can be grouped as either: 1: Derived from the existing Swiss-wide datasets a) the high quality landcover mapping from Swisstopo’s Topographical Landscape Model (TLM), b) the harmonised mapping of agricultural fields area from the ‘Landwirtschaftliche Nutzfläche’ (LWN) mapping and, in settlements areas, c) the harmonised cadastral data (‘Amitliche Vermessung’ AV). 2: Modelled within the project using Random Forest or Ensemble Modelling techniques to model the spatial distribution of individual habitat types (further detail below), 3: Combining existing species distribution models to determine habitat types, or 4: Classification with relatively simple rule-sets based on auxiliary spatial datasets, i.e. vegetation height models (based on digital aerial photogrammetry and/or SwissSurface3D aerial laser scanning (ALS) data), the digital terrain model, the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from aerial imagery and/or time-series of growing season Sentinel-2 or Planet satellite imagery. Further detail on the methodology can be found within the README document.