Site adapted land use distribution in Swiss agriculture

The published land use data were part of the project “Maps for site-adapted arable land and grassland production”, supported by the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture. The objective of this project was to examine the potential of agricultural land for arable farming and grassland use in Switzerland under the premise that agricultural land use should align with the biophysical and environmental capacity of each location. Through an iterative co-design process, three scenarios for Swiss agricultural land use were elaborated using biophysical criteria that allow for arable farming, including soil, topography (mechanical practicability) and climate. Two scenarios additionally incorporated environmental criteria, including erosion risk, the protection of water resources, and the conservation of organic soils as vital carbon sinks. Based on these scenarios, we identified a) which areas are suitable for arable farming, and b) areas that should exclusively be used as grassland due to their environmental vulnerability. Assuming that permanent crops and ecological focus areas were assumed to remain the same, we conducted Swiss-wide spatial analyses using geodata models in ArcGIS Pro 3.2.2 (Esri, 2022), which was based on the extent of the utilized agricultural area (FOAG, 2021). For the spatial analyses with other geodata, all datasets were resampled and standardized to a uniform 25x25m grid and projected into the Swiss national projection system (CH1903+_LV95). Based on the current distribution of arable land and grassland, we determined the areas of continuous arable land and grassland, and potential arable land and grassland by intersecting the agricultural area with the scenario-specific criteria for each scenario.