Scenario Chooser: An interactive approach to eliciting public landscape preferences

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. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.