Scenario Chooser: An interactive approach to eliciting public landscape preferences: Fid-Bau Portal

Scenario Chooser: An interactive approach to eliciting public landscape preferences

Smith, Eric Legge / Bishop, Ian D. / Williams, Kathryn J.H. / Ford, Rebecca M.

Highlights ► Interface for representation and selection of preferred landscape options, including interactive panoramas, popup details and maps, two options at a time. ► Full logging of user activity and graphical analysis of user logs. ► Evaluation of interface element-by-element. ► Generalized findings on approaches to presentation of multi-factorial landscape scenarios.

Abstract This paper evaluates the role of a web based interface – Scenario Chooser – that was developed to present a range of hypothetical future forested landscapes to the public with the aim of eliciting the most/least preferred forest management scenarios. The scenarios were represented by description of the applied management techniques, quantifiable landscape outputs and 3D panoramas from fixed viewpoints. This research had two goals: the first was to develop an interactive interface to present multiple scenarios for comparison and selection, the second was to evaluate the effectiveness of the interface by analysing the participant interaction logs and the evaluation questionnaire. The ability to compare the landscape scenarios using a variety of information and to see the effects of the underlying harvest systems through multiple panoramic views was considered particularly informative. Written and verbal responses indicated that this tool was easy to use, presented information in an easily understandable manner and enabled people's landscape preferences to be ascertained.