Natural Landscape Preferences: A Predictive Model

Abstract

Competition and pressure for new land uses have accelerated the need for natural resource managers to understand the interrelationships between natural features in a landscape and the public's preferences for that landscape. The purpose of this study was to identify what quantitative variables in photographs of landscapes were significantly related to public preference for those landscapes. Using factor and multiple-regression analyses, an equation was developed that used six variables and accounted for 66 percent of the variation in preference scores for photographs of landscapes. It can be concluded that it seems possible to quantify aesthetics through the methods described.