In Austria numerous institutions are more and more involved in the 
Remote Sensing business. 
Due to the more scientific character of todays Remote Sensing many 
misunderstandings occured in the past and will occur in the future. 
Therefore one has to distinct clearly between scientific and apply- 
cation oriented work. In addition it always will be necessary to 
indicate, that almost only scientific work will bring us the 
success for a feasible application of these methods. 
. The Austrian Alps and Environmental Protection 
  
The Austrian Federal Institute of Public Health, Vienna, runs in 
its Environmental Protection Division a well equipped Remote Sen- 
sing laboratory. This has to our opinion to fulfill the two tasks 
o to show up and to test new detection and measurement methods 
for the environmental protection and 
o to develop special methods and to introduce them to practical 
applications in our environmental monitoring systems. 
This laboratory prepared a number of applications which are now- 
days of importance. 
In this presentation I shall relate to the negative effects that 
tourism and specially wintersports have to a country as Austria is. 
Austria sometimes is compared with a 'natural park' in Europe and 
it really posses a great capital in its nature. Therefore we have 
to save our nature but also to utilise it with care. 
For a proper utilisation of theese values special knowledge of the 
ecology of nature is imperative. Ecology includes all organic and 
unorganic factors that interact between the nature and its environ- 
ment. One of the fundamental principals of ecology ist the ecolo- 
gical balance. If the interference into such a system exceeds a 
certain limitation, it may show visible substantial changes or it 
may break down.