We combined this year’s Advisory Board Meeting with a visit to the Wachau. We used the various means of transport on the Wachau Routes and were able to provide insights into our study area. Travelling by railway, bus and ferry allowed us to see the landscape from different perspectives and at different speeds. Katrina Petter from Public Art Lower Austria (KOERNOE) and Ingeborg Hödl, managing director of the Verein Welterbegemeinden Wachau association, enriched our tour with their expertise on local contemporary art projects and World Heritage management. At the board meeting the following day at BOKU, we presented our work on the railway studies and the prospects for the current trail studies.

This year’s meeting of the Advisory Board took place at BOKU and was held as a hybrid meeting. We presented our results of the Road Studies and an outlook on the Railway Studies. The Railway Studies will provide another perspective and expand the research on the transport routes through the Wachau. The Board gave positive feedback on the extensive research and results of the Road Studies and emphasised the complexity of the research. The videos and folders are valuable outputs that are also available on this website. In particular, the folders were recognised as a useful tool for documenting the results and are to be expanded into a series in the future. Further work will focus on the changing perception of transport routes using artistic and scientific methods. The perspectives of different users, such as tourists and commuters, will be addressed more intensively. The Wachau Railway is also popular with cycle tourists, which is already a starting point for the Trail Studies in the coming year.

With its knowledge and local expertise, the advisory board provides important inputs and enables the project team to reflect on its research. At the first meeting, we presented the research project and received valuable feedback on our methodological approaches and recommendations for further research activities. In the coming years, we will meet with the advisory board after each route study to discuss the progress of the project.

Our initial site visit was accompanied by Rosalinde Kleemaier-Wetl, who is ICOMOS Monitor for the Wachau World Heritage Site. She showed us places where the impact of traffic routes on the cultural landscape is clearly visible. In Spitz we met the World Heritage Manager Ingeborg Hödl and the nature conservation expert Hannes Seehofer in person, two proven experts on the Wachau. Ingeborg Hödl will accompany the project in an advisory position as member of the Advisory Board in the coming years. By visiting Olafur Eliasson’s Camera Obscura on the ferry in Spitz and Gelitin’s Nose in St. Lorenz, we saw two of the most important contemporary artistic works in the Wachau. The exciting insights on our first tour through the Wachau made us curious to understand this landscape in more detail.