70km2 Swiss hydrological catchments

Switzerland was initially divided into 307 catchments, from which we retained only those falling between the first and third quartiles in size (approximately 76 km² to 179 km²) to exclude extreme values in spatial extent. This filtering resulted in a final pool of catchments encompassing a broad range of topographic complexity while maintaining relative consistency in area across study sites.

The workflow provided in this repository reproduces the complete catchment preparation procedure, including the aggregation of fine-scale Swiss federal catchments, reprojection and standardization of topographic data, filtering by size, and export of individual catchment boundaries. The workflow implemented in `catchment_preparation.R` follows these main steps: 1. Load Swiss federal hydrological catchments from BAFU 2.