Impacts of climate change on mountainbiking in the Alps

Supervisor

Assoc Prof Dr Hermann Klug (hermann.klug@plus.ac.at)

Short description

Climate change in the Alps is getting more pronounced than in other environments in Europe. At the same time, the Alps are recreational centre for mountainbike enthusiasts and race athletes. To mitigate and to adapt against climate change, adaptation strategies and measures have been developed by the European Commission first. Afterwards country specific climate adaptation strategies followed by Federal State strategies. Partly, strategies developed on local level – the municipalities. However, on neither of these documents specific impacts and related countermeasures are mentioned for the mountainbike sport. The geography student should analyse the diversity of impacts on mountainbikers from the east to the west, the north to the south of the Alpine arch and from low to high elevation areas.

Data

Scientific literature

Hypothesis

Climate change has an impact on mountainbikers, which differs across the Alps! Opportunities and drawbacks result from climate change impacts.

Research question

What are the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of climate change on mountainbiking and mountainbikers in the Alps?

Objective

• To collect climate change adaptation strategies at different spatial scale in the Alps
• To search scientific articles on climate change impacts and adaptation strategies with respect to mountainbiking
• To identify climate change impacts and adaptation strategies with respect to mountainbiking
• To analyse climate change impacts, their spatio-temporal differences and potential adaptation measures after the SWOT method based on scientific literature
• To visualise and represent the spatio-temporal findings in ArcGIS Online

References

• European Union climate change adaptation strategy
• Climate change adaptation strategies from European member states covering the Alps (AT, DE, SI, LI, FR, IT, [CH])
• Federal State Agency adaptation strategies in Austria (all nine states)
• Municipal adaptation strategies (examples)

Prerequisites/qualification

Interest in mountainbiking, and solid knowledge in climate change, skills in spatial analysis with GIS, working with data

Planned Start

Any time