For the future development of Alpine landscapes the following factors are supposed to be very important: (1) expansion of the tourist infrastructure, (2) spontaneous reforestation of abandoned agricultural land and (3) appearance of decay in forests no longer maintained. The investigations presented here focused on the public's attitudes towards such potential landscape changes.
The public's attitudes towards tourism-induced landscape changes were investigated by photo-experiments with visitors of an Alpine resort. In order to analyse the public's attitudes towards spontaneous reforestation two research steps were performed: First, qualitative in-situ- interviews with tourists and locals of an Alpine region were conducted; second, the findings of the previous phase were checked by image experiments with students. The attitudes towards decay phenomena were as well investigated by qualitative and quantitative approaches, both applied in-situ.
It was shown that people are very sensitive to tourism-induced landscape changes such as expansion of settlements and tourist transport installations. In contrast, partial ingrowth of forest into an agricultural landscape as well as the appearance of decay in mountain forests were assessed positively.
Thus, from the point of view of landscape preference, planning measures should be strong enough to prevent further extensions of tourist infrastructure, whereas reforestation of abandoned land as well as decay-phenomena in mountain forests do not need to be prevented in every case.