Whither scenic beauty? Visual landscape quality assessment in the 21st century

The history of landscape quality assessment has featured a contest between expert and perception-based approaches, paralleling a long-standing debate in the philosophy of aesthetics. The expert approach has dominated in environmental management practice and the perception-based approach has dominated in research. Both approaches generally accept that landscape quality derives from an interaction between biophysical features of the landscape and perceptual/judgmental processes of the human viewer. The approaches differ in the conceptualizations of and the relative importance of the landscape and human viewer components. At the close of the 20th century landscape quality assessment practice evolved toward a shaky marriage whereby both expert and perceptual approaches are applied in parallel and then, in some as yet unspecified way, merged in the final environmental management decision making process. The 21st century will feature continued momentum toward ecosystem management where the effects of changing spatial and temporal patterns of landscape features, at multiple scales and resolutions, will be more important than any given set of features at any one place at any one time. Valid representation of the visual implications of complex geo-temporal dynamics central to ecosystem management will present major challenges to landscape quality assessment. Technological developments in geographic information systems, simulation modeling and environmental data visualization will continue to help meet those challenges. At a more fundamental level traditional landscape assessment approaches will be challenged by the deep ecology and green philosophy movements which advocate a strongly bio-centric approach to landscape quality assessment where neither expert design principles nor human perceptions and preferences are deemed relevant. On the opposite side of the landscape–human interaction, social/cultural construction models that construe the landscape as the product of socially instructed human interpretation leave little or no role for biophysical landscape features and processes. A psychophysical approach is advocated to provide a more appropriate balance between biophysical and human perception/judgement components of an operationally delimited landscape quality assessment system.