👋 Welcome to RegionMatch!

Great that you’re interested in using RegionMatch.

RegionMatch helps you identify German districts that are comparable to your region of interest – not only in terms of climate, but also with respect to sociodemography, orography, and land use.

By combining multiple perspectives, RegionMatch supports climate services, regional adaptation planning, and knowledge transfer, where similarity based on climate alone is often insufficient.

At its core, RegionMatch addresses a simple but powerful question:

Which regions are structurally and environmentally similar to my region — and what can I learn from them?

What is RegionMatch?

RegionMatch is a plugin for the Freva evaluation system that compares a user-selected reference district (NUTS3) to all other German districts.

Similarity is computed across four complementary aspects:

• 🌡️ Climate – e.g. heat, drought, and heavy precipitation indicators

• 👥 Sociodemography – e.g. population density and age structure

• 🏔️ Orography – terrain and elevation characteristics

• 🌾 Land use – shares of urban, agricultural, and forest areas

Each aspect can be weighted individually, allowing users to tailor the comparison to their specific question.

Why use RegionMatch?

RegionMatch is designed to support comparison, learning, and knowledge transfer between regions.

Typical use cases include:

• climate services and regional climate assessments

• identifying analogue regions for adaptation strategies

• transferring best practices between structurally similar regions

RegionMatch goes beyond ranking regions by similarity: for each similar region, the output includes links to already implemented adaptation measures, supporting a direct transition from analysis to practice.

Getting started

If you want to run RegionMatch right away, continue with Setup. This section explains installation, configuration, execution, and walks you through the outputs using screenshots and concrete result examples.

Background information on the data, indicators, and similarity calculation is provided in the Background theory section.

Contents:

• General Overview
  • What does “similarity” mean in RegionMatch?
  • From similarity to practical insight
  • How to interpret similarity scores
  • What RegionMatch does not do
  • Where to go next
• 🚀 Setup & Usage
  • 1. Installation and Environment
  • 2. Running RegionMatch
  • 3. Parameters
  • 4. Output
  • Next Steps
• 🔬 Dive into the Background Theory
  • 1. Mathematical Description of Similarity
  • 2. Data Basis
  • 3. Climate Indicators
  • 4. Spatial Aggregation of Climate Data
  • 5. Orography Classification
  • 6. Code Structure and Data Updates
• Contact & Support
  • 🐛 Bug reports & feature requests
  • 💬 Questions & feedback
  • ✉️ Maintainers
• How to cite this software
• License information
  • Source Code
  • Documentation
  • Data
• Contributing to RegionMatch
  • 💬 Getting in touch
  • 🧑‍💻 Contributing code
  • 🛠 Development helpers
  • 🎨 Code style and quality checks
  • 📄 Licenses and copyright
  • 📚 Contributing to the documentation
  • 🔄 Updating the plugin template

Have questions or found an issue? Please visit the Contact & Support page – we’re happy to help!