Landscape visualisation tools and methods: Decision making with scenarios

Abstract: Landscapes reflect the multifunctional nature of land and the complex relationships that exist between society and the environment. Land management systems have evolved to provide resources to meet societal demand but within a human lifetime these practices can significantly change both the landscape and the relationship that people have with the affected land. Land uses have differing, often conflicting objectives and making decisions on landscape futures is challenging to decision makers and compromises must be made between competing economic, ecological and social values. When dealing with competing criteria, land use decision-making is complex, made more so when we consider the spatial and temporal dimensions of the decisions. Scenario development is an effective way to present complex spatial and temporal information and geographical information systems provide a basis with which to assess the relative success of alternative landscape scenarios quantitatively. This paper describes a software system – ScenarioBuilder- which allows stakeholders and expert groups to build landscape scenarios depicting different forest management strategies in a 68000 Ha study area in Southern Tasmania comprising private property, state forest and national park land. The ScenarioBuilder software built around ESRI ArcObjects is operator controlled and allows manipulation, selection and display of the underlying 2D polygon based forestry data. The software includes procedures to apply combinations o