IMPROVING THE ACCURACY OF FOREST VIEWSHEDS USING TRIANGULATED NETWORKS AND THE VISUAL PERMEABILITY METHOD

Forest managers are becoming increasingly aware of the visual impacts of their operations. One way managers can address this issue is by eva luating the viewsheds of proposed management activities. Existing GIS software can be used to delineate the viewsheds of proposed management activities, but the most commonly used viewshed delineation processes suffer from a number of limitations. This study reviewed these common viewshed delineation systems and found three weaknesses that could be improved. A new viewshed delineation procedure based on triangulated networks and a technique called the visual permeability method was dev eloped to overcome these weaknesses. Field experimentation showed that this new technique was able to produce substantially more accurate vi ewsheds than were existing techniques.