Towards adaptive tourism areas? A complexity perspective to examine the conditions for adaptive capacity

Tourism area development is affected by the competitive global tourism industry and the complex, multilevel dynamics of the contemporary network society. The strategic planning and governance challenge is stimulating tourism areas to become adaptive areas, being capable of responding to changing contexts in order to maintain or improve the performance of these areas as competitive tourism destinations. This article examines conditions for adaptive tourism areas. It does so on the basis of a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective on tourism area development. The perspective is used to conceptualise tourism areas as complex and potentially adaptive systems, and to discuss how tourism area development can be understood as a multilevel, co-evolutionary and path dependent process. Furthermore, the CAS perspective is used to draw attention to the importance of a degree of diversity in terms of tourism products, experiences and firms. Encouraging a degree of diversity requires among other things interconnectivity among actors to ease communication and coordination, (policy) experimentation for niche-innovations, learning and reflexivity. The article ends with a discussion on the potential of, and constraints on, pursuing adaptive tourism areas from a strategic planning and governance point of view

Towards adaptive tourism areas: using fitness landscapes for managing and futureproofing tourism area development

Purpose – Tourism areas are challenged to become adaptive areas in the context of a dynamic networked society and globalizing economy. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an enhanced understanding and conceptualization of adaptive tourism areas by drawing attention to “fitness landscapes,” a metaphor that is used in complexity theories to visualize development trajectories of adaptive systems. Design/methodology/approach – Fitness landscapes, and its underlying theories, are useful to conceptualize tourism area development as a stepwise movement through a dynamic landscape with peaks and valleys. Doing so allows us to highlight why adaptation is a crucial property for tourism areas that are embedded in dynamic contexts and offers a frame of thought for how tourism areas can be managed. Findings – The article raises awareness about and draws attention to a set of factors and conditions that support tourism planners and managers in enhancing the capacity of tourism areas to adaptively respond to changing circumstances. Originality/value – Introducing fitness landscapes contribute to the discussion on adaptive capacity building – a topic that contributes to managing uncertain futures and is likely to gain importance in the dynamic society. Moreover, it helps as well as stimulates tourism scholars to further develop this topic. Finally, it helps tourism planners to build adaptive capacity in practice

The Doughnut Destination: applying Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy perspective to rethink tourism destination management

Purpose – In this viewpoint paper, the authors explore and discuss how Kate Raworth's (2017) Doughnut Economy perspective and accompanying “Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist” can be applied to rethink the future of tourism destination management for the better. Design/methodology/approach – The authors take a “transferability” approach, being a process performed by the authors as readers of existing work noting its specifics in order to compare them to the specifics of an environment with which they are familiar. In this viewpoint paper, the authors apply the work of Raworth to the environment of tourism destination development. Findings – The Doughnut Economy perspective and the accompanying “seven ways” help forward tourism destination management in the future, even more when it is interpreted and tailored to a tourism context and reconceptualized as the Doughnut Destination as presented in this paper. Originality/value – The work of Kate Raworth has been gaining interest and support throughout academia, society and in various (economic) policy domains. Surprisingly, it has not been applied to the tourism context to its full extent, even though it offers much potential in recent discussions on overtourism, carrying capacity and limits of acceptable change as well as offering a possible framework to structure monitoring effects in the pursuit of developing smart tourism destinations

Sustainable Tourism in the Wadden Sea Region:key mechanisms to overcome barriers to sustainability

Position paper

Identification and characterization of mouse otic sensory lineage genes

Vertebrate embryogenesis gives rise to all cell types of an organism through the development of many unique lineages derived from the three primordial germ layers. The otic sensory lineage arises from the otic vesicle, a structure formed through invagination of placodal non-neural ectoderm. This developmental lineage possesses unique differentiation potential, giving rise to otic sensory cell populations including hair cells, supporting cells, and ganglion neurons of the auditory and vestibular organs. Here we present a systematic approach to identify transcriptional features that distinguish the otic sensory lineage (from early otic progenitors to otic sensory populations) from other major lineages of vertebrate development. We used a microarray approach to analyze otic sensory lineage populations including microdissected otic vesicles (embryonic day 10.5) as well as isolated neonatal cochlear hair cells and supporting cells at postnatal day 3. Non-otic tissue samples including periotic tissues and whole embryos with otic regions removed were used as reference populations to evaluate otic specificity. Otic populations shared transcriptome-wide correlations in expression profiles that distinguish members of this lineage from non-otic populations. We further analyzed the microarray data using comparative and dimension reduction methods to identify individual genes that are specifically expressed in the otic sensory lineage. This analysis identified and ranked top otic sensory lineage-specific transcripts including Fbxo2, Col9a2, and Oc90, and additional novel otic lineage markers. To validate these results we performed expression analysis on select genes using immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization. Fbxo2 showed the most striking pattern of specificity to the otic sensory lineage, including robust expression in the early otic vesicle and sustained expression in prosensory progenitors and auditory and vestibular hair cells and supporting cells

The CRIRES Search for Planets Around the Lowest-Mass Stars. I. High-Precision Near-Infrared Radial Velocities with an Ammonia Gas Cell

Radial velocities measured from near-infrared spectra are a potentially powerful tool to search for planets around cool stars and sub-stellar objects. However, no technique currently exists that yields near-infrared radial velocity precision comparable to that routinely obtained in the visible. We describe a method for measuring high-precision relative radial velocities of these stars from K-band spectra. The method makes use of a glass cell filled with ammonia gas to calibrate the spectrograph response similar to the "iodine cell" technique that has been used very successfully in the visible. Stellar spectra are obtained through the ammonia cell and modeled as the product of a Doppler-shifted template spectrum of the object and a spectrum of the cell, convolved with a variable instrumental profile model. A complicating factor is that a significant number of telluric absorption lines are present in the spectral regions containing useful stellar and ammonia lines. The telluric lines are modeled simultaneously as well using spectrum synthesis with a time-resolved model of the atmosphere over the observatory. The free parameters in the complete model are the wavelength scale of the spectrum, the instrumental profile, adjustments to the water and methane abundances in the atmospheric model, telluric spectrum Doppler shift, and stellar Doppler shift. Tests of the method based on the analysis of hundreds of spectra obtained for late M dwarfs over six months demonstrate that precisions of ~5 m/s are obtainable over long timescales, and precisions of better than 3 m/s can be obtained over timescales up to a week. The obtained precision is comparable to the predicted photon-limited errors, but primarily limited over long timescales by the imperfect modeling of the telluric lines.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Remarks on Resonant Scalars in the AdS/CFT Correspondence

The special properties of scalars having a mass such that the two possible dimensions of the dual scalar respect the unitarity and the Breitenlohner-Freedman bounds and their ratio is integral (``resonant scalars'') are studied in the AdS/CFT correspondence. The role of logarithmic branches in the gravity theory is related to the existence of a trace anomaly and to a marginal deformation in the Conformal Field Theory. The existence of asymptotic charges for the conformal group in the gravity theory is interpreted in terms of the properties of the corresponding CFT.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur

Status of Identification of VHE gamma-ray sources

With the recent advances made by Cherenkov telescopes such as H.E.S.S., the field of very high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray astronomy has recently entered a new era in which for the first time populations of Galactic sources such as e.g. Pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) or Supernova remnants (SNRs) can be studied. However, while some of the new sources can be associated by positional coincidence as well as by consistent multi-wavelength data to a known counterpart at other wavelengths, most of the sources remain not finally identified. In the following, the population of Galactic H.E.S.S. sources will be used to demonstrate the status of the identifications, to classify them into categories according to this status and to point out outstanding problems.Comment: To appear in Astrophysics and Space Science (Proceedings of "The multimessenger approach to unidentified gamma-ray sources