A new paper by PhD Candidate Simone Philpot has just been published in the Journal of Environmental Management!
We all know that climate change is having a major impact on weather patterns around the globe. One industry that is particularly exposed to these changes is the ski industry. Though large mountain/high elevation ski resorts may remain insulated from the impacts of shorter ski seasons and more erratic weather, those ski resorts at low altitude are particularly vulnerable to a changing climate. As a mid-latitude, lower elevation (comparatively) ski region, the Pyrenees are one area where the impacts of a changing climate are pronounced.
A chapter from my dissertation has been recently published in Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. This paper, titled “Negotiating constraints to the adoption of agent-based modeling in tourism planning (PDF)” presents material from a series of interviews that I conducted with tourism planners in Nova Scotia.
The most popular post (by far) on this blog is one where I present a simple version of Butler’s Tourism Area Lifecycle (TALC), done up in Excel: A Simple Tourism Model with Excel
I’m pleased to announce that a chapter describing the development of TourSim, including a scenario on shifting tourist port of entry and identification of adoption constraints, is in the final stages of preparation for publication. This chapter is part of a new book "Planning Support Systems Best Practice and New Methods" published by Springer and edited by Stan Geertman and John Stillwell.
I’ve made some major alterations to TourSim, both in the data that it relies on, and the types of experimentation it supports. I’m thinking that this is going to make TourSim much more usable for tourism planning, and begins to incorporate many of the ideas of complexity science (such as adaptation) into TourSim.
While there is quite a bit of interest in several fields in agent-based models (ABMs) as an approach to studying issues such as resilience, and thresholds, their complexity and technical nature is a significant barrier to their use. I’ve had a number of discussions with McGill professor Dr. Garry Peterson about alternate modeling approaches. One technology that he uses in both classes and in his publications is a simple Excel spreadsheet.
For quite a while now I’ve been trying to expand the types of adaptive behaviour included in TourSim. Currently the tourists display a type of adaptive behaviour, as they move to destinations that satisfy their preferences. In the Baddeck Hotel Development model, tourists would adapt to the development of a new hotel, as more tourists visited Baddeck because of this new type of accommodation.
I’ve been hard at work adding more realistic element to TourSim.
I’ve added a new scenario to the Tourism Scenarios section. This is the second model, and is a variation on my first model. This model, titled the “Port of Entry Destination Comparison Model”, allows you to compare the effects of varying tourist port of entry on the total visitation to Lunenburg, Baddeck, and Digby. I hope to implement a function to allow you to pick from a greater range of destinations in future versions of the model. Anyways, please check out the model.