Post-Mining Predictive Visual Quality Assessment: A Methodology

The study of landscape aesthetics has recently been brought into the forefront of research through the passage of various federal legislative acts which mandate the consideration of the quality of surroundings as a natural resource. Based upon relatively recent results, we believe that science based visual quality modeling has applications in reclamation projects. We developed a visual quality prediction methodology to assess various post-mining land-use treatments (housing development, agriculture, open water, naturalized vegetation, and existing condition) for surface mining applications. Our methodology allows an investigator to qunatitatively assess visual quality treatments through inferential statistics. To conduct the assessment, one must be able to digitize photographic images and construct the treatments with an imaging software package.