ABSTRACT
The Hohe Tauern National Park holds a special position among the large protected areas in the Austrian Alpine region and of the Eastern Alps as a whole. In the early 1990s, however, the nature reserve project was officially completed, and today it is the largest national park in the Alps and Central Europe. The central question is how to combine the protection of natural and cultural landscapes of ecological, cultural or esthetical value with the economic and socio-cultural development of mostly peripheral rural areas. This question remains a constant and great challenge considering the ongoing regional structural change, which in the mountainous region of the Alpine area is characterized by far-reaching economic, socio-cultural and ecological problems. In addition, it is still unclear how the Hohe Tauern National Park could function as a catalyst' for a large-scale interregional area protection network in the main crest of the Alps whose potential importance for the Alpine area protection cannot be emphasized strongly enough.
