EAST OF EDEN
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VISUALISING FUTURE LANDSCAPES IN THE EAST OF ENGLAND ANDREW LOVETT, KATY APPLETON,TRUDIE DOCKERTY AND GILLA S키NNENBERG Introduction The future form of the British countryside is currently the subject of considerable debate (e.g. Countryside Agency, 2003; Townshend et al., 2004). These deliberations reflect a range of pressures, including economic difficulties in the agricultural sector, concerns regarding habitat loss, problems of social exclusion, and the possible impacts of climate change (DETR and MAFF, 2000; Countryside Agency 2002). Recent years have also seen an increasing emphasis on public consultation and participation within the planning system (Cullingworth & Nadin, 2002), but communicating different options in a manner that facilitates informed decisions by stakeholders can be far from straightforward. This is particularly true with more abstract and uncertain issues such as the potential impacts of climate change. Developments in computing technology are now helping to tackle these issues by making it feasible to produce visualisations of current or possible future landscapes. Map information can be compiled in digital form within a Geographical Information System (GIS) and then processed within linked visualisation software to generate a variety of outputs including still images of the view from a particular point, animated sequences (such as a flythrough of an area), or a virtual world where a mouse or joystick can be used to interactively navigate around a landscape (Appleton et al., 2002). These types of visualisations can now be produced on a PC and make use of the digital map databases available from organisations such as the Ordnance Survey (www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk). The combination of these developments has also substantially reduced the cost of undertaking this type of work and a number of studies have begun to evaluate the benefits of using visualisation techniques to communicate policy options or facilitate stakeholder engagement in decision-making processes (e.g. Batty et al., 2001; Lovett et al., 2002). The remainder of this paper presents two case studies of the use of visualisation techniques. Both studies were based within part of the area covered by the Norfolk Arable Land Management Initiative (NALMI). The first study was concerned with visualising the potential impacts of different climate change scenarios at the local scale, while the second examined several public access and restoration options along a section of the River Wissey. Implications from these studies regarding the further use of GIS-based landscape visualisations are considered in the concluding section of the paper. The Study Area NALMI is a pilot study within a national Countryside Agency programme (see www.countryside.gov.uk/LivingLandscapes/sustainable_land_management/ LMIs.asp), working with rural communities in several parts of Britain to identify means of facilitating more sustainable land management practices. Previous research for NALMI has included some assessment of potential climate change impacts in the locality (e.g. Lorenzoni et al., 2001) and the Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 40 (2004)