Interpreting Scenic Beauty Estimates

Abstract

Four difficulties in interpreting psychophysically-based scenic beauty estimates are discussed: the arbitrary sign and magnitude of the measure; the absence of information about value; the interval nature of the metric which prevents nonlinear transformations; and the extreme sensitivity of the measure which can make small managerially irrelevant differences seem large. Anchoring scenic beauty estimates to known and meaningful landscapes helps overcome these problems. A simple transformation of the scenic beauty metric enables a one unit change in a scenic beauty estimate to be interpreted as a one percent change in the scenic beauty available within a region, town, street, or project area. Even with this approach, interpreting the value of scenic beauty is difficult.