A method for considering the evolution of the visible landscape

Abstract

The visible landscape represents an important consideration within landscape management activities, forming an inhabitants’ perception of their overall surroundings and providing them with a sense of landscape connection, sustainability and identity. The historical satellite imagery archive can provide key knowledge of the overall change in land use and land cover (LULC), which can inform a range of important management decisions. However, the evolution of the visible landscape at a terrestrial level using this information source has rarely been investigated. In this study, the Landsat archive is leveraged to develop a method that depicts changes within the visible landscape. Our method utilises other freely available data sources to determine the visibility of the landscape, and LULC composition, visible from road networks when the imagery was captured. This method was used to describe change in the visible landscape of a rural area in Ñuble, Chile, in the period from 1986 to 2018. Whilst native forests on the slopes of the mountains within the study area provide a natural backdrop, because of the flat topography of most of the area, the foreground dominates the overall landscape view. This has resulted in a visible transition from a landscape visibly dominated by agricultural use in 1986 to one of equal agriculture and plantation forestry in 2018. It is hoped that the method outlined within this study can be applied easily to other regions or at larger scales to provide insight for land managers regarding the visibility of LULC.