Landscape character dominant features in resort developments

Abstract

Landscape character refers to the general impression people have of an environment. The literature suggests that certain perceived dominant features of the environment create this impression. One of the ways to investigate the dominant features of a landscape has been a classification task where people are asked to classify a group of photographs of places into categories. Each of the categories is then investigated to determine the visible features that define that class. In a progressive classification task, this dissertation investigated the dominant features in resort environments and identified the hierarchical order among the dominant features discovered. The results revealed visual features in the following hierarchy: presence of water, presence of development, amount of development, type of water body present, presence of mountains. These features are often encountered in the landscape character and landscape aesthetics literature, a fact that verifies their importance in the perception of the landscape.