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Landmarks are universal components of human urbanization. We are a species driven to mark the land with symbolic structures and craft meaning in our built environments. From ancient wonders such as Stonehenge to modern icons like the St. Louis Arch, we have been designing landmarks since the dawn of civilization. Cities, towns, and neighborhoods incorporate landmarks as elements of cultural expression and tools for navigation. Individuals use landmarks as reference points to create an internal cognitive map, permitting more efficient navigation throughout a city and contributing to a heightened sense of place. To aid in research regarding the role of landmarks on cognitive maps and place-identity, we have designed a novel testing paradigm in which subjects wear a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) and traverse a hypothetical urban environment using a gaming controller. The virtual environment (VE) features a gridded street network measuring 5x5 blocks and guides subjects along a fixed route through residential, park, commercial and industrial districts. Along this fixed route, subjects are exposed to ten distinct landmarks. After navigating the VE, subjects are tasked with delineating their perceived route, landmark locations, and district boundaries through map drawing tasks on grid paper as well as a scene recognition task. The most significant finding revealed landmark configuration accuracy to be highly correlated with performance on the route recall and moderately correlated with performance on the scene recognition task. This suggests that, regardless of the landmark type, individuals who more precisely recalled landmark locations also navigated the route and identified scenes more accurately. Landscape and urban planners can leverage these findings to advocate for the strategic inclusion of landmarks throughout an urban fabric, which we term Landmark Configuration Plans (LCP).

The COVID-19 pandemic response has had a significant impact on the general population’s ability to participate in their communities. Individuals with disabilities, an already socially disadvantaged population, are more vulnerable to and have likely been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 response conditions. Yet, the extent to which daily community living activities of people with disabilities have been impacted is unknown. Thus, this study assesses their travel behavior and community living during the COVID-19 pandemic conditions compared with those of the general population during the same period. A web survey was conducted using Qualtrics’s online panel data (respondents included 232 people with disabilities and 161 people without disabilities). Regression models found that people with disabilities reduced their daily travel to a greater extent but at varying degrees, depending on the destination types and travel modes. Reductions in taxi rides (including ride-hailing services) were most significant among people with cognitive and sensory (vision and hearing) disabilities. By place type, cognitive disability was associated with a trip reduction for multiple destination types—grocery, restaurants, outdoor recreation, indoor recreation, and healthcare providers. Findings from this study could contribute to decision- and policy-making in planning, transportation, and community services during the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic, in future major public health crises, as well as post-COVID, because the adjustments in travel behavior and community living might be longer-term.

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Identifying the best solutions to large infrastructure decisions is a context-dependent multi-dimensional multi-stakeholder challenge in which competing objectives must be identified and trade-offs made. Our aim is to identify and explore features in an interactive visualization tool to help make group decision analysis more participatory, transparent, and comprehensible. We extended the interactive visualization tool ValueCharts to create Group ValueCharts. The new tool was introduced in two real-world scenarios in which stakeholders were in the midst of wrestling with decisions about infrastructure investment. We modeled the alternatives under consideration, for both scenarios, using prescribed criteria identified by domain experts. Participants in both groups were given instructions on how to use the tool to represent their preferences. Preferences for all participants were then displayed and discussed. The discussions were audio-recorded and the participants were surveyed to evaluate usability. The results indicate that participants felt the tool improved group interaction and information exchange and made the discussion more participatory. They expressed that visualizing individual preferences improved the ability to analyze decision outcomes based on everyone’s preferences. Additionally, the participants strongly concurred that the tool revealed disagreements and agreements and helped identify sticking points. These results suggest that a group decision tool that allows group members to input their individual preferences and then collectively probe into any differences makes the process of decision-making more participatory, transparent, and comprehensible and increases the quality and quantity of information exchange.

Recent impacts from the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic, the lack of available timber in areas of lower elevation, and the reduction in back-country timber has pushed forest operations into publicly significant and visible landscapes. When these become the stage for operations they can be a source of public backlash. These kinds of landscapes are carefully protected by governments, yet, this protection may reduce timber availability. We have developed a new GIS-based tool to aid planners in designing harvests in these areas. Our tool is applied to three case studies in British Columbia to showcase how it can reduce planning time, increase timber availability and limit the negative visible effects of operations.Keywords: Visual Magnitude, Viewshed, Visual Resource Management, Planning, GIS, Visibility, Visually Sensitive Areas RÉSUMÉ Les conséquences récentes de l' épidémie de dendroctone du pin ponderosa, la pénurie de bois disponible dans les régions de faibles altitudes et la réduction de la disponibilité des bois de l'arrière-pays ont fait en sorte que les opérations d' exploitation forestière se font maintenant dans des paysages beaucoup plus visibles aux yeux du public. Lorsque ceux-ci sont deviennent la scène des opérations, ils peuvent devenir une source de mécontentement public. Ce type de paysage est soigneusement protégé par les gouvernements, mais cette protection peut entraîner une réduction de la disponibilité en matière ligneuse. Nous avons élaboré un nouvel outil établi à partir d'un système d'information géographique (SIG) dans le but d'aider les planificateurs à concevoir les blocs d' exploitation sur ces superficies. Notre outil est utilisé dans le cas de trois études réalisées en Colombie-Britannique afin de démontrer comment il permet de réduire la durée de la planification, d'accroître la disponibilité de la matière ligneuse et de limiter les impacts visuels négatifs des opérations.

In visually sensitive areas, planners use a variety of techniques to mitigate the visible effects of harvesting, including creating designs that appear more natural and less blocky. However, little empirical evidence exists about the degree to which these shapes influence preferences. We aim to fill this gap by investigating the perceptual effects of three shape characteristics: geometric primitive (circle, square, triangle, and trapezoid), complexity, and aspect ratio. Fifty-two photo-realistic images were rendered of a forest scene with a single harvest on a hillside. Forty individuals rated each image. The results indicate that geometric primitive had the largest effect on preference for harvest design of the three variables tested followed very closely by complexity. Yet, the most intriguing finding was the interaction of these two variables. In general, an increase in complexity for square and circular shapes caused higher preference ratings, while for trapezoid and triangle, this was only true as complexity progressed from low to moderate levels. The relationship between preference rating and complexity was nonlinear; the largest improvement existed at the moderate level of complexity. Operationally, this demonstrates that rounded-edged circular shapes are the most preferable but that even with a moderate level of complexity, preferences increase dramatically.Résumé : Dans les zones visuellement sensibles, les aménagistes utilisent une variété de techniques pour minimiser l'impact visuel des coupes, incluant la création de configurations qui apparaissent plus naturelles et moins géométriques. Cependant, il existe peu de données empiriques qui décrivent dans quelle mesure ces formes ont une influence sur les préférences. Notre objectif consistait à combler cette lacune en étudiant l'impact visuel de trois caractéristiques de la forme : la primitive géométrique (cercle, carré, triangle et trapézoïde), la complexité et le rapport de la longueur sur la largeur. Nous avons reproduit 52 images réalistes d'une scène forestière avec une seule coupe à flanc de colline. Chaque image a été évaluée par 40 individus. Les résultats indiquent que des trois variables testées, la primitive géométrique avait le plus d'effet sur la préférence pour une configuration de coupe, suivie de très près par la complexité. Par contre, l'observation la plus intrigante était l'interaction entre ces deux variables. En général, une augmentation de la complexité dans le cas des formes carré et circulaire entraînait un plus haut taux de préférence, tandis que cela était vrai seulement lorsque la complexité passait de faible à modérée dans le cas du trapézoïde et du triangle. La relation entre le taux de préférence et la complexité n'était pas linéaire : la plus forte amélioration est survenue lorsque la complexité était modérée. De façon opérationnelle, cela démontre que les formes circulaires dont le pourtour est arrondi suscitent le plus haut taux de préférence mais que, même avec un niveau modéré de complexité, le taux de préférence augme...