Predicting the Scenic Quality of Forest Road Corridors

Abstract

The use of scenic beauty maps to select scenic road corridors rests on two assumptions, which were tested in experiments using color slides of forest scenes. One experiment showed that the scenic quality of an individual scene did not depend on whether the scene was presented to observers as representing a general area or as part of a sequence of views from a road. The second experiment showed that the overall scenic beauty of a short sequence of slides representing a section of road could be predicted by the mean scenic beauty of the individual scenes within the sequence.