Pacific Southwest

Title: Managing for naturalness in wildland and agricultural landscapes

Author: Nassauer, Joan

Date: 1979

Source: In: Elsner, Gary H., and Richard C. Smardon, technical coordinators. 1979. Proceedings of our national landscape: a conference on applied techniques for analysis and management of the visual resource [Incline Village, Nev., April 23-25, 1979]. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-35. Berkeley, CA. Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Exp. Stn., Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture: p. 447-453

Station ID: GTR-PSW-035

Description: Visual management systems operate from the premise that people have expectations for landscape views, and that people's positive expectations should be fulfilled. Both the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management visual management systems assume that people expect wildlands to look natural. People also like to see natural landscapes in rural Iowa. Research I conducted in 1977-78 showed that naturalness, land use compatibility, water presence, and relief predict 75 per-cent of the variance in visual value of Iowa landscape views. Naturalness alone predicts 50 percent of the variance in visual value. People may have different expectations for naturalness in the context of an agricultural landscape than in a wild landscape. Although the agricultural landscape is of natural materials, it is also a landscape of designed patterns. The wild landscape displays natural materials in natural pat-terns. Differences in expectation should lead to different visual management approaches.

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Citation

Nassauer, Joan  1979.  Managing for naturalness in wildland and agricultural landscapes.   In: Elsner, Gary H., and Richard C. Smardon, technical coordinators. 1979. Proceedings of our national landscape: a conference on applied techniques for analysis and management of the visual resource [Incline Village, Nev., April 23-25, 1979]. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-35. Berkeley, CA. Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Exp. Stn., Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture: p. 447-453.