By Sofia Linke
Abstract:
Landscapes in Europe are continuously decreasing in their extent being threatened by agricultural industrialization and urbanization. People's awareness of this endangerment recently raised and diverse sets of policies, strategies and measures have been developed. In order to realize these in an objective manner the landscapes' current status quo should first be defined. One approach is to compare similar landscapes across Europe using available digital high resolution topographic maps. This study investigates the possibilities of comparing landscape characteristics by applying visibility measures in a geo-information system on national digital topographic datasets. There are two studies taken into consideration: computed visibility measurements with the isovist methodology and 360° movie evaluations. Study areas of different landscapes with available digital topographic datasets were selected and visibility measurements were applied on chosen subsets. The computed results were then evaluated concerning their reliability by asking individuals to analyze 360° panorama movies.
The findings show that the visibility measurements can only be used to a limited extent. They do not always properly indicate landscape openness. The reliability depends on the degree of landscape openness and the type of map used. The limitations originate from the method itself, but also from the choice of landscapes and datasets. With the panorama movie evaluation a new methodology has been developed, that is capable of resembling landscape openness. It became possible to evaluate the computed visibility measures and to give an estimation of their relation to the real world. This representation seems to be especially significant in large scale open landscapes.
Keywords:
Human perception, space conception model, landscape character, landscape openness, digital topographic vector maps, ATKIS, Digitales Landschaftsmodell (Basis-DLM), Top10vector, visibility measures, isovists, relation to the real world, panorama movies.