The Alpine Network of Protected Areas is celebrating its 10th anniversary as part of the international conference on "Alpine Protected Areas: Between History, Development and Challenges".
Alps / Europe
Via Alpina, the project for a network of long-distance hiking trails, now features a new internet website at www.via-alpina.org . The Trails heading provides an opportunity to travel all 341 stages of the Via Alpina virtually, using interactive maps of different scales.
As part of the MARS Interreg IIIB project (Monitoring the Alpine Region's Sustainability) 22 partners from six countries (A, CH, D, FL, I, SI) worked on drawing up a set of indicators for measuring and evaluating sustainable development in the Alpine region.
The Alise project (Alps IT Service Network) is designed to provide those small and medium-sized businesses for which IT operations have become a burden with all the IT services they require directly from the Network.
The Future in the Alps competition being held across the Alps has been very well received. By the July 20 submission deadline individuals and organisations from all eight Alpine countries had submitted more than 570 projects.
Representatives of Bavaria's Ministries of the Environment, Economic Affairs, Agriculture and the Interior, and of the Bund Naturschutz have agreed on around a dozen climate protection measures in a further step in implementing the Climate Protection Alliance they concluded in 2004.
Satellites are to be used in a bid to improve the risk management of landslides, avalanches, mudslides and floods in Alpine regions. This is the objective of the latest ASSIST (Alpine Safety, Security and Informational Services and Technologies) research project, which is currently being launched as part of the European "Global Monitoring for Environment and Security" (GMES) initiative.
The latest brochure of the Austrian Alpine Association (ÖAV) features hiking and mountaineering regions in Austria which actively implement the Alpine Convention's Tourism Protocol.
The model project "No Barriers at the Berchtesgaden National Park" is to get underway in Berchtesgaden/D in July 2005. The project is to look at ways in which people with physical disabilities or restricted mobility can gain access to unspoilt natural environments.
Italian researchers have been analysing the excrements of two packs of wolves roaming Italy's Alpine region.