Assessing the visual quality of the Maxton Plains alvars.

摘要

This study assesses and documents the visual quality of the Maxton Plains alvar/alvar grassland plant communities found on Drummond Island, Michigan, USA. These small, rare landscape types are not addressed by large-scale visual quality mapping efforts and may differ from predicted scores. Visual quality was assessed using two evolutions of the existing visual quality assessment model to accomplish the study's secondary purpose, which was to compare their performance. Equation (1) produced a score set ranging from 52.70-57.17, with an average of 54.32, a variance of 0.72, and a standard deviation of 0.85. Equation (2) produced a set of scores (hereafter referred to as Set 2) ranging from 47.12-52.67, with an average of 50.55, a variance of 0.84, and a standard deviation of 0.90. The results of the visual quality assessment reveal that the Maxton Plains alvars and alvar grasslands have consistently high-to-moderate visual quality and are visually equivalent. The results also indicated that there are slight differences between evolutions of the model that could play a role in future studies.