Alps

GLORIA: A global observation research initiative in alpine environments
The first internationally coordinated initiatives to observe the environment in Alpine regions date back to the 19th century. Around 1880, the first mountain observatories were established on European mountains. Today, the record of their activities provides a meteorological time series covering more than a century. Continuous meteorological measurements on high mountains in other continents...
Protective forests and silvicultural stability: An example of planning in the Aosta Valley
Protection is of vital importance to human populations and activities in the European Alps. In the short to medium term, failure to manage alpine protective forests leads to intolerable risks for people who live and make a living in alpine valleys. The most important features of a protective forest are its stability properties, that is, its ability to carry out its protective function reliably...
GIS Assessment of vegetation and hydrological change in a high mountain catchment of the northern limestone Alps
Large-scale vegetation mapping (1:10,000) was applied to obtain estimates of the hydrological properties and dynamics in catchment areas that supply water to the capital city of Austria (Vienna). Vegetation types as defined by standard relevé technique, such as alpine grassland, snow bed vegetation, and krummholz were related to habitat conditions. A GIS served as the focal exploration...
Urban strategies and regional development in the Alps

Nearly two-thirds of the population in the European Alps (which totals 14.2 million) lives in towns or peri-urban municipalities. The authors state that strong towns in the Alps are necessary to prevent outmigration. But these towns must be internally integrated with their hinterlands and externally integrated in supraregional networks to maintain the quality of life and contribute to regional...

Between conservation and development: Concretizing the first world natural heritage site in the Alps through participatory processes
This article presents an empirical interdisciplinary study of an extensive participatory process that was carried out in 2004 in the recently established World Natural Heritage Site Jungfrau–Aletsch–Bietschhorn in the Swiss Alps. The study used qualitative and quantitative empirical methods of social science to address the question of success factors in establishing and concretizing a...
Hydropower and climate change - a reciprocal relation: Institutional energy issues in Switzerland

Since the extremely dry and hot summer of 2003, the question of what effects ongoing climate change will have on hydropower in Switzerland - mainly on the amount of electricity that will be produced, but also on the safety of hydropower plants - has often arisen. Even though predictions of the potential impacts of climate change on hydropower generation are characterised by uncertainty,...

Climate and hydrology in mountain areas

The characteristics of climate and hydrology in mountain areas remain poorly understood relative to lowland areas. High spacial and temporal variability in precipitation, runoff and subsurface flow processes, and stream flow, as well as sparse instrumentation networks and limited historical records of climate and hydrology, contribute to limited understanding of the distribution and movement...

Locals' and tourists' sense of place: A case study of a Swiss alpine village
The development of Swiss Alpine landscapes must comply with the needs of different interest groups. It is assumed that the way people relate to places, and particularly the sense of place they have, is a basis for their needs and aims regarding future landscape development. Conflicts among aims can be better understood if the underlying place relations are known. Therefore, the authors...
Mountain research across boundaries: A portrait of the international scientific committee on research in the Alps (ISCAR)
The (European) Alpine Convention is a commitment with the status of international law, signed in 1991 by all Alpine states. The parties—Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the principalities of Liechtenstein and Monaco, Slovenia, and Switzerland, and the European Union—have agreed to cooperate with regard to sustainable development in the Alps. The domains and modalities of cooperation...
The International Society for Alpine History (AIHA)

Do the Alps - and mountain areas more generally - have a history, other than a geological one?  That is to say, do the societies that dwell in mountain regions, epxloiting their resources and dealing with their imperative nature, have a past, near or far, that characterises them as different from the populations of the plains, metropolitan centres and maritime coasts?  A past that...

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