Assessment Method for Agricultural Landscapes through the Objective Quantification of Aesthetic Attributes

This paper presents a new approach for assessing agricultural landscapes based on mixture methods and the study and definition of aesthetic attributes as lines, forms, texture, spatial composition, scale and color as they are the closest to human perceptual aesthetic attributes. A set of variables capable of quantifying those attributes in a simple, objective and systematized way will be proposed. They are related with physical dimensions such as length, radium, angle, surface or brightness. People preferences for a specific type of agricultural landscape have been collected and different regression models between preferences and variables capable of quantifying attributes have been tried. The optimal model, explaining 82.3% of the variance in population preferences, selects 41 variables, adopts a linear structure and identifies the color as the most relevant attribute on population preferences and, inside it, green brightness as the most positive influencing variable on preferences being referred to red gamma the most influencing negative one.