Climate change severely affects Alpine regions. Adaptation to climate change is needed in order to deal with these impacts, but the implementation of national adaptation strategies is inhibited by multiple obstacles. Regional strategic frameworks are just emerging, adaptation is of little priority to local agendas and policy mainstreaming is limited on all administrative levels. This paper provides a better understanding of the governance of adaptation to climate change in Switzerland, an example of a federal system with a strong focus on subnational levels and multilevel governance. We conceptualize governance as a network of policies, measures, actors and knowledge, and visualize their interactions using D3.js, a data-driven JavaScript library. The findings illustrate the typical division of labour in federal multilevel governance systems. The national level provides a strategic framework and funding and conducts coordinating measures at subnational levels, especially the local-level implementation of concrete measures. Conducting comparable mappings for other countries would allow interesting comparisons and insights into common barriers and opportunities to adaptation to climate change.

When a hazard event strikes, the reachability of affected areas is a significant factor that can determine if the situation becomes a disaster. Decision makers have to react quickly while under stress to tasks that depend on the road network, such as management of relief operations, planning of evacuation routes, or food and first aid distribution. In this paper we present an approach for exploring and validating reachability of remote areas through visualization with an interactive tabletop and tablets. We propose a simple way to combine and visualize data from scientists and communities to provide insights into area reachability, as well as the likely impacts of future hazard events on access routes. Moreover, our interface introduces an approach to assess alternative accessibility options to isolated settlements by helicopter or off-road routes that builds on satellite data and interactive collaborative mapping. This set of visualization and interaction techniques facilitates the formation of risk scenarios for better planning, preparedness and response activities. We developed our research with a case study of landslide threat for an area in Colombia.

With relational perspectives, we examine the potential of traversing cultural collections along the richness of individual facets and relations through the process of developing an exploration-centered visualization. Cultural collections can contain thousands of artifacts, of which each typically possesses a diverse set of properties and individual facets constituting a unique relationship to the rest of the collection. Therefore, to create an appropriate representation of the complex data of each underlying artifact, oftentimes, it is not only interesting to get an overview of the entire collection from one perspective, but to explore the specific context of an artifact and the various relations it may have to other items. To investigate the potential of relational perspectives, we selected an art collection as a particularly promising case study. By following and reporting from a collaborative and iterative design process with an art museum, we developed a web interface that contrasts a collection overview with three situated visualizations each exposing a different kind of relational perspective on the art collection from an artifact.

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