Deep inside Switzerland’s forests, mountains, and valleys, scientists have created something unusual: a map of sunlight itself. The new Switzerland light map shows how much solar energy actually reaches the ground, revealing a hidden layer of nature that humans usually overlook. A patch of land under a tree, beside a road, or on a snowy slope may look ordinary, but the amount of light it receives can shape everything around it.
The national-scale dataset, known as SwissRad10, transforms invisible patterns of sunlight and shade into detailed environmental information. It tracks ground-level light across Switzerland at a resolution fine enough to capture the influence of individual trees, mountain shapes, and landscape features.
