Ecological Modelling 295 (2015) 136–150 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Modelling journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolmodel The Swiss Landscape Monitoring Program – A comprehensive indicator set to measure landscape change Felix Kienast a,∗ , Jacqueline Frick b , Maarten J. van Strien c , Marcel Hunziker a a Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, 8903 Birmensdorf, Switzerland b Zurich University of Applied Sciences, School of Life Sciences and Facility Management, 8820 Wädenswil, Switzerland c Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland article info Article history: Received 26 December 2013 Received in revised form 18 July 2014 Accepted 7 August 2014 Available online 27 August 2014 Keywords: DPSIR Landscape perception Physical landscapes Landscape observation 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 Mon- itoring 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, fas- cination 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. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Landscapes 1 and their change over time are of great rel- evance for natural resource management and spatial planning (Kienast et al., 2007; Willemen et al., 2008; Termorshuizen and Opdam, 2009). Consequently monitoring of landscape patterns and landscape perception by people is decisive. For natural resource management, it is important to know how habitat patches and their configurations change over time, because population fitness does not only depend on the amount of habitat present in a landscape, but also on how the patches are arranged in space (Turner et al., 2001). Spatial planning, on the other hand, has an interest to assess ∗ Corresponding author at: Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zurcherstrasse 111, 8903 Birmensdorf, Switzerland. Tel.: +41 44 7392366; fax: +41 17374080. E-mail address: felix.kienast@wsl.ch (F. Kienast). 1 A number of definitions for landscape are reported in the literature. In this paper we define landscapes as medium-scale excerpts of the globe’s surface, shaped by nature and humans and perceived by people (Kienast et al., 2007; Müller et al., 2011). Landscapes exhibit distinct, recognizable, and consistent patterns of elements that make one landscape different from another (Swanwick, 2002). the outcomes of planning activities (Wang and Watkins, 2009) with regularly updated landscape data, e.g. data on recreational proper- ties of landscapes or repeated assessments of landscape character. 2 Since landscapes are an inherent part of the cultural and perceived environment and play an important role for people’s place attach- ment, understanding how landscape change is perceived can lead to better spatial planning that incorporates these important aspects (Hunziker et al., 2007). Finally, political-administrative obligations may require monitoring of landscape change; for many European countries, the European Landscape Convention obliges member countries to monitor both the natural and the socio-economic aspects of landscapes (Council of Europe, Web Resource). Despite the necessity to monitor landscapes, to date there are few systematic – and at the same time holistic – landscape obser- vation programs, at both the continental and regional scale. The reasons for this deficit are twofold: 2 “The distinct, recognizable and consistent pattern of elements in the landscape that makes one landscape different from another” (Swanwick, 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2014.08.008 0304-3800/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.