Planning Tools for Managing Landscape Aesthetics
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, forest managers realized that they needed to manage forest aesthetics when people who saw clearcuts began voicing opposition to timber harvesting on public lands (Gobster 1999). In response, the USDA Forest Service developed guidelines for managing aesthetics with publications such as the “Visual Management System” in 1974. This guide explains how to “identify aesthetic values in the landscape, define people’s sensitivity to landscape change, and set standards for preserving, enhancing, or retaining aesthetic quality and mitigating the effects of landscape development” (Gobster 1999: 55).
Prescribed burn plans and wildfire suppression strategies include methods to maximize the visual quality of a landscape (Bacon and Dell 1985). Managers who use strategies to enhance aesthetics in their broader land management programs are more likely to be successful at maintaining forest structure, protecting culturally valued features, and encouraging attractive trees, groves, wildflowers, fruits and nuts, wildlife and other features (Sheppard, Achiam, D’Eon 2004). Fire management plans that take into account aesthetic impacts will be better coordinated with broader land management plans which must include the goal of managing visual quality.
Managers can use the theories and methods of landscape architecture, landscape forestry, computer visualization, and visual quality management to design plans that address the aesthetic quality of an area. The techniques of visual resource management can help managers shape features of the landscape so they please the human senses. Visual resource management is important for several reasons (Sheppard, Achiam, D’Eon 2004):
- It increases support of land management plans.
- It enhances the restorative effects of landscapes.
- It enhances recreation.
- It improves quality of life.
- It improves community viability.
- It increases tourism assets and visitation.
A number of models and methods for assessing visual quality are available to managers.
- Visual Project Analysis is a model that the U.S. Forest Service and other public agencies use to measure landscape aesthetics (Smardon 1986).
- VIEW-IT is a computer-based model that allows managers to assess aesthetic quality from multiple viewpoints in a landscape.
- Visual Absorption Capability (VAC) maps the “ability of a landscape to absorb management activities such as roads, utility corridors, ski slopes, lodges, and timber harvesting” (Chenoworth 1991: 15).
- Managers can use the SBE method to predict the public’s aesthetic preferences prior to taking a management action (Daniel and Boster 1976).
- The public’s subjective values related to beauty can be directly measured using surveys, interviews, rating photographs of landscapes (Steinitz 1990; Chenoworth 1991), computer-based image simulation, simulations of future forest conditions, and other methods.
- The value of beauty can be quantitatively measured by calculating the economic impacts of visitors to scenic places and the effects of physical changes in the visual quality of places.
- Linear regression models can be used to appraise real estate and assess the market value of lands with different visual qualities (Chenoworth and Niemann 1982; Graaskamp and Robbins 1982).
- Government agencies such as the USDA Forest Service (1974) and the British Ministry of Forestry (1995, 2001) have handbooks to help managers design forest edges, corridors, harvesting operations, and other features and activities that are visually appealing.
- Demonstration forests are important educational tools for teaching landowners and forest-users about the effects of burning on aesthetics and other resources including wildlife habitat, water quality, and recreation.
Encyclopedia ID: p800
