Grassland-use intensity maps for Switzerland

A rule-based algorithm (Schwieder et al., 2022) was used to produce annual maps for 2018–2021 of grassland-management events, i.e. mowing and/or grazing, for Switzerland using Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 satellite time series. All satellite images were processed with the FORCE framework.

The resulting maps provide information on the number and timing of grassland-management events at a spatial resolution of 10 m × 10 m for the whole of Switzerland. For the final maps, permanent grasslands were masked using a variety of land-use layers, according to Huber et al. (2022) but replacing the crop mask with the agricultural-use data from the cantons.

We assessed the detection of management events based on independent reference data, which we acquired from daily time series of publicly available webcams that are widely distributed across Switzerland. We further tested the ecological relevance of the generated intensity measures in relation to nationwide biodiversity data (see Weber et al., 2023).

The webcam-based reference data used for verification was subsequently added on 14.02.2024.