Swiss Environmental Domains
A new spatial framework for reporting on the environment
Swiss Environmental Domains (SwissED) is an environmental classification of the territory based on key climatic, geologic and topographic variables that influence both natural and anthropogenic processes at various scales. It constitutes a new spatial framework to analyse data about our environment (e.g. biodiversity, land cover, demography) that does not replace existing ones, but complements them.
SwissED was inspired by several similar initiatives developed in Australia, New Zealand, USA and Europe. It follows a quantitative and reproducible approach in two stages: i) a non-hierarchical classification, assembling environmentally similar pixels of the Swiss territory into 120 groups, i.e. domains, ii) a hierarchical classification of these 120 groups into 100, 50, 25 or 10 domains. These can be coloured according to the results of a Principal Component Analysis (PCA), where red corresponds to a gradient of temperature, green to a gradient of calcareous content and blue to a gradient related to topography. The first 10 domains were named according to their environmental characteristics.
SwissED presents the natural potential of the landscapes independently of human activities. It can therefore serve as a spatial framework to analyse any type of data according to domains that are based on climatic, topographical and geological conditions. SwissED would be particularly well suited to present sustainable development indices based on the principle that economy depends on society, and society itself depends on the environment.
Source: BAFU, GRID-Europe 2010: Swiss Environmental Domains. A new spatial framework for reporting on the environment. Federal Office for the Environment, Bern. Environmental studies no. 1024: 71 pp.