Scenic beauty of river views in the Grand Canyon: relating perceptual judgments to locations

The purpose of this study was to evaluate various presentation methodologies for use in the quantification of observer’s perceptual judgments while traveling along linear features such as roads, trails, or, as in this study, rivers. This study includes an evaluation of the methods used to present subjects with representations of places and attempts to bridge the gap between existing empirical evidence that uses slides as presentation stimuli to the proposed method of presenting 360° panoramas. Forty-seven sites along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon National Park were presented to observers in one of four different presentation methodologies. The representational validity of the presentation methods for quantification of scenic beauty of locations was assessed by means of comparison among the presentation conditions. Results indicate that in heterogeneous landscapes, such as the Grand Canyon, independent ratings of individual photographs from a common location cannot simply be averaged to find the overall rating of the location as a whole.