CONCLUSIONS AND COMMENTS 



PUBLICATIONS CITED 



The above studies represent an effort to measure the visual 

 impact of various harvesting and roading activities using 

 primarily one technique— the Scenic Beauty Estimation 

 Method— as a basis for quantifying viewers' ratings of 

 visual quality. Any attempts to quantify something as 

 elusive as "scenic beauty," or more specifically the 

 perception of scenic beauty by many individual viewers 

 cannot be precise, and the SBE method like any other has 

 inherent limitations and shortcomings. 



Nevertheless, the case studies here have provided a 

 good insight to public likes and dislikes for different 

 activities affecting the landscape. The SBE method's use of 

 slides and panel viewers is a convenient way of obtaining 

 public opinion, at a fraction of the cost of taking people out 

 on the site. 



Specifically, these studies indicate that: 



1. In forest landscapes people like natural and orderly 

 scenes as opposed to disturbed, disorderly ones. 



2. Revegetation and tree growth following disturbance 

 improves viewer's ratings over time. 



3. The ability to quantify viewers' ratings of different 

 treatments and changes in ratings over time following 

 treatments gives managers a tool for comparing how 

 much visual benefit is gained using one treatment versus 

 another. 



At the same time it should be recognized that many 

 other techniques can be used to measure viewers' ratings 

 of scenic beauty and to extend the findings reported here. 

 For example, techniques have been developed to identify 

 what features in a given scene are liked or disliked, and 

 what impact extraneous features have on the perception 

 of the scene under view (Swanson 1976; Touzeau 1976). 



Throughout these studies questions were asked as to 

 how ratings might be affected if a group were given an 

 interpretive presentation on timber harvesting, or how 

 different groups, such as environmentalists, differ from, 

 say, loggers in their ratings of harvested areas. These 

 are highly relevant questions to land managers, but 

 were beyond the scope of these studies. We would note, 

 however, that although the viewer panels represented a 

 wide variety of interests, from school teachers to forestry 

 students to timber industry representatives, scenes were 

 ranked in the same order of relative like or dislike in 

 virtually every evaluation, regardless of the group. Very 

 similar results were reported by Daniel and Boster (1976) 

 in a comparison of 26 different groups. 



In light of these results, the case studies reported here 

 can be considered as indicators of the public's reaction to 

 different harvesting and roading activities. 



Anderson, Norman H. 

 1972. Scales and statistics: parametric and nonpara- 

 metric. In Statistical issues: a reader for the behavioral 

 sciences. Roger Kirk, ed. Wadsworth Publ. Co., Inc., 

 Belmont, Calif. 



Arthur, Louise M. 

 1977, Predicting scenic beauty of forest environments: 

 some empirical tests. For. Sci. 23:151-159. 



Arthur, Louise M., and Ron S. Boster. 

 1976. Measuring scenic beauty: a selected annoted 

 bibliography. USDA For. Serv. Gen. Tech. Rep. 

 RM-25, 34 p. Rocky Mt. For. and Range Exp. Stn., 

 Fort Collins, Colo. 



Daniel, Terry, and Ron Boster. 

 1976. Measuring landscape esthetics: the scenic beauty 

 estimation method. USDA For. Serv. Res. Pap. 

 RM-167, 66 p. Rocky Mt. For. and Range Exp. Stn., 

 Fort Collins, Colo, 



Daniel, Terry C, and Herbert Schroeder, 

 1980. Scenic beauty estimation model: predicting 

 perceived beauty of forest landscapes. In Proceed- 

 ings: Our National Landscape. Conference on Applied 

 Techniques for Analysis and Management of the Visual 

 Resource. USDA For. Serv. Pac. Southwest For. and 

 Range Exp. Stn. and Univ. Calif., Berkeley. 



Schweitzer, Dennis L,. James R. Ullrich, and Robert E. 



Benson. 



1976. Esthetic evaluation of timber harvesting in the 

 northern Rockies— a progress report. USDA For. Serv. 

 Res. Note INT-203, 11 p. Intermt. For. and Range Exp. 

 Stn., Ogden, Utah. 

 Swanson, Frederick H., Jr. 



1976. Assessing the esthetics of timber harvesting in 

 the northern Rockies. M.S. thesis. Univ. Mont., 

 Missoula. 60 p. 

 Touzeau, Roy F. 



1976. Scaling perceptions and preferences of forest 

 scenes from Coram Experimental Forest: an applica- 

 tion of multidimensional scaling. Ph.D. thesis. Univ. 

 Mont., Missoula. 325 p. 



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