The Habitat Map of Switzerland v1

Lebensraumkarte der Schweiz/La carte des milieux naturels de Suisse The FOEN funded project ‘Developing a Habitat Map of Switzerland’ conducted at the WSL, has produced a map of Swiss habitats according to the TypoCH classification (Delarze et al. 2015) 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). The implementation of the Habitat Map of Switzerland is a vector data set, where each polygon of the dataset is classified to one habitat type only.

Habitats are mapped through a variety of approaches that can be grouped as either: 1: Derived from the existing Swiss-wide high quality landcover mapping from Swisstopo’s Topographical Landscape Model (TLM), 2: Modelled within the project using Random Forest or Ensemble Modelling techniques to model the spatial distribution of individual habitat types, 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, the digital terrain model, the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from aerial imagery and/or time-series of growing season Sentinel-2 satellite imagery.