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The aim of this meta-analysis is to adapt the principles of sound timbre description to environmental sounds. In order to reach this goal, we inventoried timbre studies of diverse environmental sounds in terms of stimuli, experiments, perceptual results and correlated acoustic features. Then, we tried to systematize sound description by comparing the different perceptual spaces in order to identify the main environmental sound classes and their associated timbre spaces. Thus, we identified three main environmental sound classes within our sound dataset: impact sounds, motor sounds and instrument-like sounds. These three classes each have their own timbre space. We finally used perceptually relevant acoustic features to explain these timbre spaces, according to the main acoustic specificities that define each sound class. We thus found that the brightness feature is shared by the classes to discriminate sounds, while other particular features are used within each class.