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 envir onmental management practice and the perception-based approach has dominate d in research. Both approaches generally accept that landscape quality deri ves from an interaction between biophysical features of the landscape and p erceptual/judgmental processes of the human viewer. The approaches differ i n the conceptualizations of and the relative importance of the landscape an d human viewer components. At the close of the 20th century landscape quali ty 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 maki ng process. The 21st century will feature continued momentum toward ecosyst em management where the effects of changing spatial and temporal patterns o f landscape features. at multiple scales and resolutions, will be more impo rtant than any given set of features at any one place at any one time. Vali d representation of the visual implications of complex gee-temporal dynamic s central to ecosystem management will present major challenges to landscap e quality assessment. Technological developments in geographic information systems, simulation modeling and environmental data visualization will cont inue 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 th at construe the landscape as the product of socially instructed human inter pretation leave little or no role for biophysical landscape features and pr ocesses. A psychophysical approach is advocated to provide a more appropria te balance between biophysical and human perception/judgement components of an operationally delimited landscape quality assessment system. (C) 2001 P ublished by Elsevier Science B.V.