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Virtual Tourists in the Swiss Alps
Roland Piquepaille writes "Farmers in Switzerland receive money from their government for letting their cows eat young trees in the Alps. But why? Because this is improving the mountain views for tourists who might return year after year and spend their cash in the country. As the Swiss government wants to wisely spend its money, it is using a computer model of the mountains populated by virtual tourists -- or software agents -- which tirelessly take the same roads again and again and give their appreciation about the best spots. The Economist reports about these virtual tourists in this very cleverly-titled article, "Computer browsers." What will be the next logical step? Pay more the farmers with the strongest potential to improve the views for real tourists? Wrong. Instead, real hikers will be invited to explore the virtual Alps to give their feedback. Their observations will be then integrated into the software managing the virtual travelers. Read more for pictures and references."
Feel free to add him to your foe list.
Roland Piquepaille
The entire scheme has a few problems associated with it. First, if the mountainsides suffer too much soil erosion, you can be damn sure the tourists won't be hanging around. Nor will the farmers, for that matter. It's awfully hard to farm rock.
The second problem is that this assumes that the tourists are interested in seeing the mountains from any viewpoint low enough to support trees. More than a few tourists are interested in climbing the mountains, which would generally put them above the tree line.
Also, many tourists are quite content to see quaint villages, junky tourist-trap shops, and the usual round of Alpine monastaries with their infamous breweries.
There's also some environmental damage. The Pennines in Britain suffered badly from deforestation, from Neolithic times right the way through to the late Middle Ages. The ground, which supported Giant Redwoods at one point, is now largely peat bogs. It's unclear if the damage is reversible at all. The Alps are infinitely harsher. As such, it would logically take considerably less to render the ground unusable.
Last, but by no means least, the tourists with the most money are the Americans. Americans were never very cosmopoliton to start with, but this whole "War on Terror" carp has produced considerable phobia of travel. As such, investing the money on countering the damage done by Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld to the travel industry would probably produce far higher returns on the investment.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm too lazy to sift through the thread and see if someone's already answered this, but cows, sheep, goats, etc. will all eat trees. Specifically, this article is referring to natural regeneration; not trees in the large-and-I-can-make-furniture-out-of-them sense, but trees in the in-120-years-I-can-make-furniture-out-of-them-sens e. Nothing more than a branch sticking out the ground, so to speak. IAAPF (I am a Professional Forester) so I can say that some species are actually quite tasty too! (Sassafras tastes like root beer, and black birch tastes like wintergreen for example)
May the threads progress competently.
Yes, cows can eat trees (as can deer and other ungulates). They don't necessarily need to eat the woody stems to kill the trees - without foliage the tree is doomed anyways. Animal browsing can dramatically affect the composition of a forest by preventing shade tolerant and later successional species from establishing in the forest understory, or in this case, preventing forest from establishing at all.
Imagine all that pine scented methane!
I was lucky enough to visit Swizterland this summer. Spent most of my time around Geneva. Saw the CERN visitor center, and saw the very first web server, a NeXT cube. Waited too late to get reservations in time to get the full tour. Anyway, this whole business of the cows eating trees to clear the mountain views sounds a bit odd. I really doubt the Swiss are that stupid. We went and saw the Matterhorn and the only thing that obscured the view was clouds. It finally cleared up enough so we could see 90% of the mountain. Zermatt was like a big Disney attraction with lots of Japanese tourists.
I visited Gruyere and saw the castle and the H.R. Giger Museum.. He's one sick puppy. Had a beer at his Giger Bar. That was cool. Gruyere is of course famous for it's cheese. We took the took the tour of the cheese factory at the base of the mountain. We had an electronic device that we could punch in a number and hear the narration for each station. Our narrator was Cherry the Cow. She informed us when drinking her milk you could taste EVERYTHING she's ever eaten.
Thank God we don't drink dog's milk or we'd be able taste everything they've ever eaten or excreted and eaten or vomited and eaten or drank out of the toilet."You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
There are about 210 RP submissions, the first being posted by michael dating back to November 20, 2002.
. ..19
I went through 119 of the postings, here's the editor submission tally:
michael.......39
timothy.......30
simoniker..
hemos.........15
CmdrTaco......9
Cowboy Neal...5
samzenpus.....1
Cliff.........1
Whether this brings to light any pattern, who knows. It will be interesting to find out the true story behind this.