How do policy options modify landscape amenities? An assessment approach based on public expressed preferences

Facing the changes in the agricultural sector as well as new growing demands from society in relation to the European countryside, new questions emerge as to the management of the agricultural landscapes. The multiple combination of production with the support of multiple functions is a challenge for present day management. Tools are needed that make it possible to assess how a certain landscape can support in particular cultural and amenity functions, those that directly depend on the public preferences. The objective of this paper is to describe the proposed Landscape Amenity Model (LAM), a landscape amenities evaluation tool developed within the framework of the Integrated Project SEAMLESS. The LAM is based on the calculation of the Index of Function Suitability (IFS) for a given landscape, based on the distance between that landscape and the preferred landscape, as expressed by different users. The paper goes further in applying IFS namely by examining two different approaches for deriving land cover pattern preferences by users, either gathered from questionnaire surveys or expert panels in two case-studies, one in Portugal and another in France, respectively. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.