CONCEPTUALIZING SMOOTHNESS AND DENSITY AS LANDSCAPE ELEMENTS IN VISUAL RESOURCE-MANAGEMENT

Several dilemmas stand in the way of meeting the goals of visual resource management. The landscape is rich in potential qualities that can be assessed, but the choice of appropriate attributes is more difficult. What is readily measured is not necessarily what is most useful to examine. Furthermore, what is readily discernible from eye-level photographs may not be readily available as mapped information. Two attributes, smoothness and density, are the focus of the current study. Their choice is based on prior empirical efforts and their promise as qualities that could be translated to mapped (e.g. geographic information system; GIS) form. Though intuitively straight-forward, definitions of these concepts in terms that are amenable to computer-based spatial format posed a variety of challenges. The present effort has developed working definitions of these attributes that make them scorable in other contexts and by other researchers. Further, an initial exploration of the relationship of these attributes to different landcover types suggests that although each landcover type tends to have its own characteristic range, these attributes also permit meaningful distinctions within these categories.