Food system research requires an understanding of system actors and activities. To this end, we codesigned and conducted a food system mapping process in 2 regions, one in Kenya and the other in Bolivia, that stretches frommountains to lowlands and involves sites of interconnected food system strategies related to these habitats. We adapted an existing method of mapping local food webs to an approach that subdivides food systems into 4 subsystems: operational, political, information and services, and natural resources. Through the mapping process, a group of local and external researchers and practitioners identified the most important food value chains in the study areas. They also identified the value chains' reach, as well as related actors; flows ofknowledge, information, and finance; and the natural resources the food systems depend on. A power/interest matrix complemented the mapping results with information about different actors' roles in the food systems; this can help to identify the best target groups and entry points for efforts to improve the sustainability of food systems in the diverse habitats forming part of these food systems. Mapping and a brief analysis of actors and interests are first steps toward assessing the sustainability of a food system. The participatory nature of our approach enhanced coordination between projects of research and practice and helped to increase the relevance and applicability of the mapping results and related activities.

Mountain communities that use local foods are more likely to be food secure over time. However, historical and contemporary policies have largely homogenized food systems by replacing diverse local foodstuffs with less diverse market-based foods. These transformations often mean that nutrition-related chronic diseases increase. We explored current and past food systems of families living in Andean landscapes in Mapuche territory, Chile. We recorded local community perceptions of food system transformations using participant observation, informal and semistructured interviews, and weekly food diary elicitation. Older participants agreed that food systems have shifted drastically since their childhoods. Food items have changed, as has the way food is procured and prepared. Perceived drivers of these changes include shifts in children's food preferences (associated with schooling and the National Food Program), the loss of cooking spaces and utensils, lack of time and temporary migration, and a decreasing production of local grains and vegetables. Food diaries (n=170 meals) collected during summer's abundance period showed that locally produced ingredients comprised 55% of families' total intake and market-based foods 45%. However, during seasonal scarcity participants reported that proportions of market-based foods increased. Rice and noodles have replaced traditional foods such as locro, soplillo, and quinwa. Participants reported an increase in diet-related chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. The Mapuche food system is facing a process of biocultural homogenization with an increase in nutrition-related chronic diseases. One major recommendation is to restructure the National School Food Program to better serve cultural particularities in Mapuche territories and to engage local experts in this rethinking. By developing new frameworks for culturally appropriate and healthy eating habits in school, children could have more access to local foods, thus strengthening traditional food systems.

This article pursues 2 objectives: First, we show how a national park project in the Swiss Alps, Parc Adula, was addressed in contemporary neoliberal discourses on conservation and how these discourses influenced the rejection of the park. Second, we use triangulation to bridge the gap between 2 data analysis approaches, combining qualitative methods with the quantitative analytical tools of corpus linguistics. This allows an in-depth analysis of discourses surrounding and influencing national park planning. Furthermore, we outline challenges faced by conservation incentives based on discursive gaps and different uses of language in the arguments of government officials and residents affected by park negotiations. In the case of Parc Adula, these discursive gaps and language differences created distrust and made park planning difficult. This further reinforced a discursive disruption within and between neoliberal understandings of conservation and local discourses, eventually leading to the rejection of the national park project. This paper presents a novel analytical perspective on current conservation issues in Alpine areas and opens up ground for further research on communication practices, their local embeddedness, and their impacts on protected area establishment.

The economic benefits of protected areas are at the core of the worldwide discourse about nature protection. The literature as well as simple logic suggest that economic benefits are likely to enhance positive attitudes toward the source of the benefits. However, the results of the present research project, based on both quantitative and qualitative (interview) data, covering 2 national parks in the Polish Carpathians, do not support this hypothesis. At the local level, the worst relationships between park authorities and local communities and governments were identified in municipalities that absorbed most of the park-generated money flows or at least maintained the most business relationships, primarily because of their physical proximity to the park's headquarters, enabling more frequent formal and informal contacts. By contrast, positive attitudes toward the parks usually came from more distant municipalities. This may be due to either a generally low importance of park-generated financial benefits for the local people in these areas or the limited impact of utilitarian arguments on their attitudes toward nature protection.

A case study in the Solukhumbu region in northern Nepal reveals that the high number of seasonal tourists—which has doubled in 20 years—has led to growing water, food, and energy demands that have modified agropastoral practices and the use of local resources. This has induced new patterns in the movement of goods, people, and animals in the Everest region and the reconfiguration of the water–energy–food nexus. We use this concept of nexus to analyze ongoing interactions and transformations. Key changes involve (1) massive imports of consumer goods; (2) use of local resources with new techniques (hydropower plants, improved mills, greenhouses, and pipes for domestic networks) that depend on imported materials, which are newly accessible to Sherpas as a result of economic benefits generated by tourism; (3) commodification of local resources (water, hydropower, vegetables, fodder, and flour); (4) an increasing number of electrical appliances; and (5) new uses of water, especially for tourist-related services, including hot showers, watering of greenhouses, bottling of water, and production of electricity for cell phones, rice cookers, and other electric appliances. These new uses, on top of traditional ones such as mill operation, compete in some places during spring when water supplies are low and the tourist demand is high. A transfer of pressure from one resource (the forest) to another (water) has also resulted from the government ban on woodcutting, incentives to develop hydropower, and the competition between lodges to upgrade their amenities by offering better services (such as hot showers, plugs to recharge batteries, internet connections, and local vegetables). Our research finds that water is now central to the proper running of the tourist industry and the region's economy but is under seasonal pressure.

Winter backcountry sports such as skiing and snowshoeing have experienced a tremendous increase in popularity in recent decades in the European Alps. Recreationists commonly encounter other recreationists on their route. Because enjoying solitude and being close to nature are important motivations for pursing winter backcountry activities, crowding on backcountry routes is highly likely to diminish recreational experiences, with potential consequences for nature and recreationists. This study explored perceptions of and responses to crowding among Swiss backcountry skiers and snowshoers, using an online survey that asked about their motivations for pursing their activity and gauged their perception of crowding using the “people at one time” approach. Each of the 830 participants rated 4 scenarios on a 9-point Likert scale ranging from “far too few people” to “far too many people” and answered follow-up questions about potential displacement choices in response to perceived crowding. Participants rarely perceived backcountry routes as having too few people but often perceived them as crowded. We found only minor differences in perceptions of crowding among participants pursuing different activities or those with different motivations. The most common reaction to perceived crowding was to avoid the route in the future, and the next most common was to adjust a route to avoid the crowd on the day in question. This indicates that crowding is likely to lead to short- and long-term spatial displacement of winter backcountry sport activities. This is likely to have a negative impact on wildlife—as well as on backcountry recreationists' safety, because they might inadvertently enter avalanche-prone areas.

Our study focused on a postdisturbance area that arose after the large-scale windstorm on 19 November 2004 in Tatra National Park, northern Slovakia. The wind destroyed forest stands dominated by Norway spruce at elevations from 700 to 1400 m above sea level. The windstorm dramatically changed the forest stands in the national park, motivating our research teams to study postdisturbance tree cover dynamics. We quantified tree species composition (diversity) and carbon pool in whole-tree biomass of young forest stands after the disturbance, in 2007, 2010, and 2016. The number of tree species was significantly greater at lower (below 900 m; foothill sites) than higher elevations (above 900 m; mountain sites). The number of species increased between 2007 and 2010, and after 2010 almost stabilized. In 2007, estimates showed an average of 1.9 tons of carbon per hectare in the lower sites and only 0.4 tons in higher sites. Between 2007 and 2016, carbon stocks in whole-tree biomass grew to 11.5 t ha^-1in lower sites and 5.3 t ha^-1in higher ones, with an average for the entire area of about 8 t ha^-1. Estimates showed that the carbon stock in whole-tree biomass before the calamity (in 1996) was 101 t ha^-1. After the wind disturbance, higher biomass stock was found among conifers (especially Norway spruce) at lower elevations and among broadleaves (mostly birch) at higher elevations. We found that tree species composition after the wind disturbance was more diverse than that before forest destruction. The current tree species composition seems to be a positive consequence of disturbance, especially given the species composition's resistance to harmful agents, including wind and bark beetles.

The Research Center for Digital Mountain and Remote Sensing Application at the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment (IMHE), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is a research unit specially focusing on developing key geospatial techniques based on geographic information systems and remote sensing methods. The purpose of this research is to dynamically monitor, evaluate, and assess the mountain ecoenvironment, especially in the mountain areas of southwest China, but also extending to the whole of South Asia. By applying multisource remote sensing observations at different spatial scales (point, local, regional, and continental) and using different data sources (in-situ measured, air-based, and space-based), the Center aims to develop key quantitative remote sensing methods for mountain areas and to construct an integrated platform for mountain geoinformation sharing and application. Based on these tools and activities, it seeks to provide scientific evidence and technical support for related research in the fields of mountain eco-environment, mountain geohazards, and mountain development in China.