Integrating spatio-temporal environmental models for planning ski runs

Abstract

The establishment of ski runs and ski lifts, the action of skiing and maintenance of ski runs may cause considerable environmental impact. Clearly, for improvements to be made in the planning of ski runs in alpine terrain a good understanding of the environmental system and the response of environmental factors and processes to a new development is necessary. This requires the identification of environmental factors and processes that have a direct or indirect relation with a ski piste, such as hydrological processes, hazardous processes and vegetation, and the acquisition of knowledge about them. Moreover, to find the best ski run alternative with respect to environmental concerns, we need to explore potential ski run locations distributed over the area feasible for a new development. Taking into account these issues, this thesis addresses four aspects, 1) the identification of environmental criteria that are important in the planning of environmental sound ski run, 2) the generation of potential alternatives that meet the conditions of feasible ski runs, 3) the development and application of spatio-temporal environmental models to evaluate alternative scenarios, in particular to describe the mechanism at a potential ski run location for the current situation and to analyse the response of the environmental system to the new development of a ski run, and 4) the integration of the environmental criteria by means of multicriteria analysis. While spatiotemporal environmental models generate maps for a certain number of time steps, traditional multicriteria analysis requires a value for each environmental criterion. Therefore emphasis is put on the integration of spatio-temporal models in multicriteria decision making (MCDM) and how the spatial and temporal model output can be translated into meaningful indicators. The presented methods and tools are used to evaluate ski run scenarios in the ski area of Sölden, Austria, mainly based on the hydrologic behavior, hazardous processes and vegetational changes caused by each alternative.