Resumen de Seasonality, diversity and aesthetic valuation of landscape plots: An integrative approach to assess landscape quality on different scales
Beatrice Schüpbach, Xenia Junge, Petra Lindemann Matthies, Thomas Walter
The amenity function of landscapes is of growing importance in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union as well as in the reformed direct payment system of Swiss agricultural policy. This is reflected in a growing amount of direct payments for landscape stewardship, which enhances the need for landscape quality assessments. A good assessment system should be based on sound indicators applicable on different scales.
Diversity indices are often used to evaluate landscape quality. However, the aspect of seasonality is often neglected, although it is a typical quality of landscapes in temperate zones. This paper aims at including the aesthetic valuation (measured as rating scores) and seasonality, as a substitute for quality in a diversity index.
Overall, 27 landscape plots of 1 km2 size with mapped land-use types were used to calculate diversity indices in two different ways: firstly by using the accumulated area of each landscape element (area-based approach) or the number of landscape elements (number-based approach) per plot, both times weighted by rating scores. Secondly with a “simplified element list” where only the landscape elements with a rating score above the mean of all rating scores were considered as single elements, while the remaining elements were aggregated to one element after weighting their area by the rating score. Furthermore for all types of calculation the accumulated absolute seasonal diversity was calculated.
Plotting the accumulated absolute seasonal diversity on the x-axis against the mean diversity index values revealed, that only using the “simplified element list” can mitigate the effect of diversity index calculations where an increasing number of elements in a certain area automatically results in increasing diversity values, irrespective of their impact on aesthetic quality. This presentation in a x–y plot offers information to interpret the results, and can be applied in national and international monitoring systems.
This novel approach is limited due to its restriction on 27 landscape plots of 1 km2 size and to the lack of seasonal rating scores for all landscape elements that can be found in Switzerland. Additional data have thus to be provided. However, this should hardly be extra work in assessment projects if the number of fields and area sizes for each element can be taken from farm databases.
