Identifying cues for monitoring stewardship in Swedish pasture landscapes
-
-
[1] Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Noruega
-
[2] University of Agricultural Sciences. Sweden
-
- Localización: Land use policy: The International Journal Covering All Aspects of Land Use, ISSN 0264-8377, ISSN-e 1873-5754, Nº. 53, 2016, págs. 20-26
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Perceived stewardship is an important factor driving people’s landscape preferences, and there is a need for landscape planning and monitoring tools to address this characteristic in landscape management. The European Landscape Convention emphasizes landscapes as perceived by people, so the political pressure to develop indicators suitable for monitoring landscape qualities related to perception has increased. This paper presents the results from a study that uses eye-tracking to explore what it is in the agricultural landscape that people look at when asked to evaluate stewardship. In the study, photographs of Swedish agricultural landscapes were shown to 19 respondents while their eye movements were recorded, and after each picture they were asked to evaluate the landscape in terms of stewardship using a 7-point Likert scale.
The result shows that features such as fences, patches of grass, edge zones, and wooded vegetation in pasture attracts attention to a high degree, emphasizing their role in the assessment of stewardship. The features identified as important for assessing stewardship have been discussed in relation to their identification in aerial photographs, using image analysis techniques as an example of how one can scale up the results for the monitoring of perceived stewardship in the landscape. This article demonstrates that novel techniques from the cognitive sciences could help the development of landscape indicators with which to analyse aspects important for human well-being and landscape multifunctionality.
