Nature-based tourism as therapeutic landscape in a COVID era: autoethnographic learnings from a visitor's experience in Iceland.

One of the few silver linings in the COVID pandemic has been a new appreciation for, interest in, and engagement with nature. As countries open, and travel becomes accessible again, there is an opportunity to reimagine sustainable nature-based tourism from a therapeutic landscape lens. Framed within the therapeutic landscape concept, this paper provides an autoethnographic account of a visitor's experience of three different natural landscapes in Iceland shortly after the country's fourth wave of the pandemic. It adds to the understanding of the healing effects of the multi-colored natural landscapes of Iceland. The natural landscapes of interest herein include: the southern part of the Westfjörd peninsula, Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon, and the Central Highlands. In totality, the natural, built and symbolic environments worked in synchronicity to produce three thematic results: restoration, awe and concern, all which provided reduced stress, renewed attention, as well as enhanced physical and psycho-social benefits for the autoethnographic visiting researcher. Implications of these restorative outcomes for sustainable nature-based tourism in a post-COVID era are discussed. This paper highlights how health and tourism geographers can work collaboratively to recognize, protect, and sustain the therapeutic elements of natural landscapes, recognized as a cultural ecosystem service. In so doing, such collaborations can positively influence sustainable nature-based tourism development and consumption through proper and appropriate planning and development of such tourism destinations.

Rehabilitation of pure alexia: a review.

Acquired reading problems caused by brain injury (alexia) are common, either as a part of an aphasic syndrome, or as an isolated symptom. In pure alexia, reading is impaired while other language functions, including writing, are spared. Being in many ways a simple syndrome, one would think that pure alexia was an easy target for rehabilitation efforts. We review the literature on rehabilitation of pure alexia from 1990 to the present, and find that patients differ widely on several dimensions, such as alexia severity and associated deficits. Many patients reported to have pure alexia in the reviewed studies, have associated deficits such as agraphia or aphasia and thus do not strictly conform to the diagnosis. Few studies report clear and generalisable effects of training, none report control data, and in many cases the reported findings are not supported by statistics. We can, however, tentatively conclude that Multiple Oral Re-reading techniques may have some effect in mild pure alexia where diminished reading speed is the main problem, while Tacile-Kinesthetic training may improve letter identification in more severe cases of alexia. There is, however, still a great need for well-designed and controlled studies of rehabilitation of pure alexia.

A novel modelling approach for evaluating the preindustrial natural carrying capacity of human population in Iceland.

The pre-industrial natural carrying capacity is believed to have limited the human population in Iceland to a maximum of fifty to sixty thousand inhabitants. Since AD 1800 the Icelandic population has gradually grown up to nearly 300 thousand in 2005. In this paper a simple approach is used to evaluate the potential population size that the pre-industrial Icelandic environment could possibly sustain. A dynamic model was constructed that simulates the population size according to potential biological production available for livestock. Biological production was determined by the extent of the total potential vegetation cover based on the Degree-Day concept. Fluctuations in the mean annual temperature causes changes in the potential vegetation cover and as a consequence change the biological production sustaining livestock and ultimately human population. The simulation's results indicate that the potential population that the Icelandic environments could sustain during the pre-industrial period fluctuated between 40 and 80 thousand. The results further indicate that the severe land degradation experienced after the Viking settlement period in AD 900 had a marginal impact on the population size. The pre-historical population did however overshoot the natural sustainability on several occasions.