Measuring Forest Landscape Quality

Our natural surroundings influence many facets of human life, from health to economics, where we choose to live and how we spend our time recreating. So, as environmental management takes steps toward “sustainability” it helps to know how our plans are going to not only impact the environment and our pocketbooks, but also the places we call home.

My dissertation research is helping to provide new tools and methods for including aspects of aesthetics into forest management. Through the combination of GIS and Remote Sensing technologies coupled with perception research, I am working toward defining quantitative measurements that connect with individual preferences. The goal is to aid planners in finding ways to balance the economic, ecological and visual aspects of forestry.

There are several technologies that are being employed for this research…

Spatial Information Science

I have developed stand-alone GIS/Raster Analysis software that includes many different components and algorithms from some of the more common spatial analysis tools. The software I have created includes the latest viewshed algorithms with some major enhancements that provides more realistic measurements for simulating a 3D perspective. Some other contributions include: patch analysis statistics, economic assessments and some new techniques for identifying perspective view ridgelines (not the terrain ridgelines, but the ridgelines perceived from any given point).

Visualization and 3D Simulation

Harvest planning is often done from a planimetric level, but including a 3rd dimension and visualizing the changes in a particular landscape can be a powerful aid to harvest planning. My research includes the development of 3D photo-realistic models, but these are not trivial to use and often cost-prohibitive. So, I have began developing algorithms that use the 2D plans, but provide a simple quantitative analysis of how those plans will be perceived in 3D – without the need of sophisticated 3D modeling tools.

Human Perception Research

As exciting and innovative as Spatial Information Science and 3D Simulation are, people and the connection to our lives are fundamentally at the core of this research. So, in order to bring the other two components of this research back to us, I have began calibrating the quantitative aesthetic measurements to individual preferences. I focus on involving people by understanding their preferences through simulated surveys and qualitative questioning. The benefit of this research provides a missing link that often exists between the discrete quantitative world and the human-dimension.