Visual quality indicators foe assessing landscape characteristics and managing its protection.

The study of a landscape can be considered as a multidisciplinary topic that should include all its different characteristics and their relationships in space and time. The international scientific literature currently proposes several methodologies for the assessment of landscape visual quality, jointly with the analyses of natural, agricultural and human component dynamics, which are at the basis for land planning and management. In this paper, suitable landscape visual characteristics have been identified through the elaboration of some relevant indicators, able to take into account different land components and based on the concepts of six landscape visual characters, i.e.: coherence, disturbance, historicity, complexity, naturalness and ephemera. After a methodological framework description, an analysis in an open-source GIS environment has been applied. This approach is based on the integration of landscape metrics and land use data, which are the starting point for implementing these indicators. The methodology allows to analyze large land portions, for which the study area of a whole Italian region – the Basilicata Region - has been considered. The final result is represented by a series of different map-based indicators, that can be individually analyzed, or even combined, so as to formulate a general index for the landscape visual quality.