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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Use of Landscape Indicators in Environmental Assessment

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A fundamental characteristic of the Strategic Environmental Assessment procedure is the use of indicator-like tools for measuring effects generated by plans and programmes that affect the environment and landscape. There are many kinds of indicator categories, but this chapter focuses attention on those related specifically to the landscape. Measuring many aspects of reality, by indicators, is easy today—but for landscape and its cultural aspects, the same fails to apply because, differently from water, air, soil and all the biotic and abiotic elements, technicians must consider variables in which the degree of subjectivity is very high. In spite of this reflection, Strategic Environmental Assessment procedures also include, among the elements to evaluate, landscapes. Many scholars in the last few years have investigated in this field and demonstrated, with results more or less arguable and satisfactory, feasibility in trying to express landscape values by using the language of numbers. This chapter, after a mandatory general introduction about the indicator concept, examines the problems related to the use of landscape indicators and presents some of the most interesting arrays of indicators present in sectorial literature, underlining the questions already opened.