Parlimal: Mammals in Swiss Parliaments

List of parliamentary affairs

All the times the animal was mentioned, with links to the source.

About Parlimal

Parlimal is a dashboard visualizing the occurrence of Swiss mammals in parliamentary affairs. It explores how often and where specific animals are mentioned in parliamentary discourse across Switzerland.

Data Sources

This project relies on several open data sources to build its dataset:

• Swiss Mammals Species List: The list of mammals of Switzerland was sourced from: GBIF.org (13 January 2026) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.cavcb3
• Translations & Taxonomy: Vernacular names for the species list were resolved using the GBIF API endpoint at https://api.gbif.org/v1/species/{usage_key}/vernacularNames.
• Parliamentary Data: The core dataset of political affairs is retrieved via the OpenParlData API. The API aggregates data from the Swiss Parliamentary Services and various cantonal and municipal parliaments.
• Animals are searched for by querying the OpenParlData API with German, French, Italian and Rumantsch vernacular names, plus scientific names. The results are then run through a small named entity recognition model (using spacy) to filter out often occurring false positives, such as politicians named "Herr Fuchs" by filtering out persons. This does not catch everything, but a lot.
• Geographic Data: The locations of parliamentary bodies were geocoded using Nominatim, which uses open data from OpenStreetMap.
• Map Tiles: The background map tiles are provided by CartoDB (Dark Matter style), based on OpenStreetMap data.
• The source code for the application is hosted on Codeberg