This readme file was generated on 14.04.2025 by Chloé Wüst

GENERAL INFORMATION

Title of Dataset: Estimate of Switzerland's organic soils version 2.4

Author and principal investigator
Name: Chloé Wüst
ORCID: 0000-0002-8517-782X
Institution: Agroscope, Agroecology and Environment Department, Climate and Agriculture Group
Address: Agroscope, Reckenholzstrasse 191, 8046-Zürich Affoltern, Switzerland
Email: chloe.wuest@agroscope.admin.ch

Date of data collection: 2012-2024 (updated data sets 2022-2024) 


SHARING/ACCESS INFORMATION

Licenses/restrictions placed on the data:

There are two data sets available, one covering all of Switzerland, and one without surfaces in the cantons Bern and Freiburg. The data sets are otherwise the same.

Licence information:

OrganicSoils_CH_2024 (10.5281/zenodo.14942864)
These data are published under the following licence: 
CC BY-SA 4.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

OrganicSoils_no_BE_FR_2024 (10.5281/zenodo.14942897)
These data are published under the following licence: 
CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Links to publications that cite or use the data: The data are described in and were used by the following publication: https://doi.org/10.19189/001c.130819

Links to other publicly accessible locations of the data: https://map.geo.admin.ch/


DATA & FILE OVERVIEW

File List: 1. Documentation (contains abstract and licence information); 2. Geodata (contains geodata compatible with QGIS (.gpkg) and ESRI (.gdb) software).


DATA SPECIFIC INFORMATION

These data were generated using existing, mostly published, datasets from various sources. These sources are listed in https://doi.org/10.19189/001c.130819

The surfaces are labelled as one of four classes. The meaning of these four classes is given in the publication (https://doi.org/10.19189/001c.130819) and is summarised below:
Class 1 = The 'more conservative' organic soil surface i.e., it is more certain that these surfaces are organic soil; this is equivalent to the classes 1,2,3 and 4 in the 2015 map.
Class 2 = Together with class 1 forms the 'less conservative' organic soil surface estimate, which is recommended for most uses; class 2 is equivalent to class 5 in the 2015 map.
Class 3 = There is historical evidence that these surfaces were organic soil, but modern evidence is lacking; equivalent to classes 6 and 7 in the 2015 map.
Class 4 = It is possible that these surfaces are or were organic soil but there is no evidence of this; equivalent to class 8 in the 2015 map.