| dc.description.abstract | The Environmental Impact Assessment Act, through the use of The Social Impact
Assessment (SIA) established public participation in environmental decision-making. The
concern for landscape aesthetics has been one among many issues, and has received special
prominence in the case of timber management in Ontario’s northern forests. Research on
landscape perception has contributed to the debate. Typically such studies use rating
methods to evaluate public perceptions of landscape quality, beauty and/or aesthetics.
However, these studies did not consider whether luminance-, spatial- and/or chromatic
variations influence aesthetic judgments in the natural environment. From that perspective,
this study is an extension of earlier visual search studies that investigated the effects of
specific spatial and chromatic properties of target stimuli into the realm of landscape
perception. Based on the findings from this extensive body of work, we predicted that
high levels of chromatic conspicuity and extrinsic (or unnatural) regularity in spatial
patterning in a wilderness scene would have a negative impact on the public perception of
forest landscapes. Three conditions representing landscape elements (targets) that simulate
silvicultural practices were manipulated using Adobe Photoshop software. The targets
were a checkerboard clear-cut, an irregular cut, and a roadway. The chromaticity of each
target was defined by the target midtones (average across 400 pixels, or 1° subtense). The
“neutral” chromaticity was equated across checkerboard and irregular patches. The
chromaticity of the targets was modulated (7 steps) along red-green axes in Commission
Internationale de l’Eclairage (CIE) 1931 chromaticity space. All presentations were done
on a high-resolution colour monitor (CRT). Each of the targets was presented in five
background conditions of oblique aerial photographs of coniferous trees with and without a
lake to determine position bias and target/lake proximity effects. Each of the 16 observers
per background condition (N=80) was presented 84 randomized landscapes from a total of
420 images. Data interpretation was conducted using a 4-way multifactor design with
repeated measures on 3 factors (5 randomized backgrounds X 3 spatial targets X 7 target
chromaticities X 4 quadrant locations). Results showed that varying the spatiochromatic
properties of the silvicultural targets and their locations significantly influenced the
perceived beauty of northern forest landscapes. Patches in a scene that had spatial
regularity and a colour appearance that was shifted towards the “reds” were given the
lowest ratings. Comparable situations can be observed in real scenes that have undergone
recent harvesting operations. | |
