Change of permanent grasslands extent (1996-2015) and national grassland dataset of Switzerland

Abstract

So far, neither a grassland map, temporal analysis of the conversion of permanent grassland (PG) to other land uses nor the differentiation of permanent and temporal grassland exists for Switzerland. For the first time in Switzerland, we present a Swiss national grassland map for the year 2015 capturing the extent of both, permanent and temporal grasslands (here called grasslands) by intersecting the information of three datasets. We blended the high temporal resolution Climate Change Initiate (CCI) Land Cover of 2015 (processed by the European Space Agency (ESA)), with the high spatial resolution Swiss topographical landscape model “SwissTLM3D” and the landscape model “vector25” both provided by Swisstopo. The final data presents the spatial patterns and the national extent of Swiss grasslands. Furthermore, the recently published (April 2017) CCI Land Cover dataset allow extracting the extent of grasslands for 24 years (1992–2015) with a coarse spatial resolution of 300 m. We used the time series data of the grassland extent to produce annual PG maps from 1996 to 2015. That data enables the identification of the development of grassland extent over two decades. The Swiss national grassland map is used for investigating the spatio-temporal patterns of the soil erosion risk of Swiss grasslands (see Mapping spatio-temporal dynamics of the cover and management factor (C-factor) for grasslands in Switzerland, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2018.04.008 (Schmidt el al., 2018)). Keywords: Land use change, Land cover classification, Time series, Change detection, Soil erosion, Alpine environment, C-factor, CCI Land Cover