Monitoring of Supporting Measures - Environment (MSM-E)

Sub-Project 1

Staff: Charlotte Steinmeier, Kalin Müller, Meinrad Küchler, Carmen Frank

Introduction

Landscapes in Central Europe are constantly undergoing changes due to different land use claims. It is not known if there is an accelerated change close to main transportation routes. According to Swiss studies an increase of 36% - 87% in freight traffic and 16% - 31% in individual motorised traffic is forecasted on Swiss roads  between 1997 and 2020. It is expected that the landscape already is an will be influenced more by the increasing traffic . Therefore the Monitoring Supporting Measures - Environment (MSM-E) concentrates on the effects of traffic on the environment along the main transit routes in Switzerland.

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Purpose

The purpose of this sub-project is to set up a monitoring for landscape changes along the transit routes. It includes finding the most suitable data sources and deriving indicators from them. Further the extent of the transit-corridor has to be defined. And to obtain first results we analyse the current state of the landscape an the retrospective changes wherever possible.

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Study Area

The study area is the landscape along the main transit routes
A2 and A13 through the Swiss Alps. As control regions we chose The A1, which is also a motorway, but not a transit route.

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Stratification

We demarcate the potentially influenced landscape by using the relief, that is the river catchment areas. We then attribute the the investigation area with the ecoregion, the motorway assignment and to rural or urban area. According to these criteria, the analyses are for these subregions.

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Indicators and Data Sources

The study area covers about ¼ of the Swiss landscape and touches around 20 cantons. Therefore and in order to observe the change regularly we build the monitoring on data sources which are available every few years for the whole of Switzerland. The derived indicators cover all land use classes. However, as the largest changes happen in the settlement and urban areas, we look at them in more detail.

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Analysis

Our focus lies on the distance analysis. We compare the distance zones and look whether there is a distance trend in the defined indicators. We further compare the different motorways and the different ecoregions and rural or urban areas to find similarities or disparities.

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Results

Preliminary results of the current state show that the landscape close to the motorways are stronger developed that further away or than the average of the corresponding ecoregion. This effect is also apparent if the relief is filtered off. The analysis of the retrospective changes show that this effect hardly depends on the distance only.

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Conclusions

The results show that the current landscape correlate to a great part with the distance to the motorway. It suggests that the motorway has influenced the landscape. However, if we look at the changes, the distance seems not to be such an essential factor.

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Publications

For publications and posters on this subject please contact Charlotte Steinmeier or Kalin Müller.