Visual quality assessment in a GIS environment as a Decision Support System for landscape planning.

An important aspect to be considered in the study of a landscape is how people perceive it. Assessing the landscape visual quality has a fundamental importance, and it is one of the parameters to be taken into account for planning issues. Moreover, it has an additional significance, because in many cases there is a relationship between visual and ecological landscape indicators. In this paper, nine landscape visual characters (coherence, disturbance, historicity, complexity, naturalness, visual scale, stewardship, imageability and ephemera) have been taken into account to elaborate map-based indicators. Considering the scale and the complexity of the assessment, these indicators have been combined into a GIS environment, so as to create an overall visual quality index. The methodology has been applied to a case study in Southern Italy, whose landscape is extremely diversified, with many critical issues in terms of protection and enhancement. The GIS revealed as a powerful tool for an accurate and replicable analysis, because it allowed to combine different indicators based on land cover data and landscape qualitative and quantitative parameters. The obtained indicators revealed very useful for a stand-alone evaluation, as well as an information base which could profitably be included in a Decision Support System (DSS) for landscape planning.