The Swiss Landscape Monitoring Program – A comprehensive indicator set to measure landscape change

Abstract

Landscapes are unique resources for nature conservation, recreation, and tourism and are important for quality of life and people's place attachment. This makes the monitoring of physical landscape patterns as well as their perception by the local population imperative. The Swiss Landscape Monitoring Program LABES (abbreviation for German “Landschaftsbeobachtung Schweiz”) is an attempt to generate a comprehensive indicator set for high quality landscape assessments at the national scale. The monitoring is based on the driving force concept and the DPSIR framework (i.e. Driving force–Pressure–State–Impact–Response) proposed by the European Environmental Agency. Developed between 2008 and 2013, the indicator set allows analyzing the physical aspects of landscapes and – equally important – how local residents perceive the landscape in their municipality, e.g. its beauty, fascination or authenticity. At the moment only ca. 50% of the indicators are available as time series, which limits analysis of temporal trends. However, further time steps are planned. In this article we present the full set of indicators, perform a quality assessment, and exemplify some innovative indicators. The quality control includes correlation analysis between the indicators as well as a principal component analysis and cluster analysis. The aim is to test the indicators for geographical representativeness, collinearity, and possible overlap as well as to derive a reduced set of indicators that form an indispensable core set.