The Assessment of Landscape Expressivity: A Free Choice Profiling Approach

RESEARCH ARTICLE The Assessment of Landscape Expressivity: A Free Choice Profiling Approach Stephan P. Harding1☯*, Sebastian E. Burch2☯, Françoise Wemelsfelder3☯ 1 Schumacher College, Dartington, Devon, United Kingdom, 2 Posada del Valle, Collı́a, Arriondas, Asturias, Spain, 3 Animal and Veterinary Sciences Group, Scotland’s Rural College, Roslin Institute Building, Easter Bush, United Kingdom ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * Abstract a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Harding SP, Burch SE, Wemelsfelder F (2017) The Assessment of Landscape Expressivity: A Free Choice Profiling Approach. PLoS ONE 12(1): e0169507. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0169507 In this paper we explore a relational understanding of landscape qualities. We asked three independent groups of human observers to assess the expressive qualities of a range of landscapes in the UK and in Spain, either by means of personal visits or from a projected digital image. We employed a Free Choice Profiling (FCP) methodology, in which observers generated their own descriptive terminologies and then used these to quantify perceived landscape qualities on visual analogue scales. Data were analysed using Generalised Procrustes Analysis, a multivariate statistical technique that does not rely on fixed variables to identify underlying dimensions of assessment. The three observer groups each showed significant agreement, and generated two main consensus dimensions that suggested landscape ‘health’ and ‘development in time’ as common perceived themes of landscape expressivity. We critically discuss these outcomes in context of the landscape assessment literature, and suggest ways forward for further development and research. Editor: Duccio Rocchini, Fondazione Edmund Mach Centro Ricerca e Innovazione, ITALY Received: September 9, 2015 Introduction Accepted: December 19, 2016 A perennial concern in scientific landscape assessment is whether qualities we ascribe to landscapes and their features such as meadows, woodlands and mountains are an intrinsic, objective aspect of the landscape itself, or reside only in the eye of the beholder as an aesthetic, subjective perception [1]. Both such objectivist and subjectivist stances have inspired a large variety of landscape studies in recent times. However, a core feature which these studies tend to have in common is that only humans are considered to be psychologically engaged with landscapes–other sentient organisms play no role. On the one hand, subjectivist approaches tend to address landscape qualities as constructs ‘in the mind’ formed through socio-cultural conditioning and individual imagination. In this perspective landscapes hardly feature other than as an adjunct to human experience. On the other hand, approaches that ascribe some kind of objective standing to landscapes tend to do so in functional ecological terms, focusing on features amenable to quantitative measurement, such as number of hedgerows, acres of woodland, or number and orientation of fields. The term ‘objective’ here refers to locating qualities ‘out there’ in the landscape, while physicalising these qualities in externalist, mechanistic terms, that dismantle and deflate any psychological significance qualities may carry Published: January 23, 2017 Copyright: © 2017 Harding et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0169507 January 23, 2017 1 / 18 Assessing Landscape Expressivity through the activities of sentient organisms. Thus neither subjectivist nor objectivist approaches tend to consider landscape itself as bearing meaning–its meaning is thought to be purely symbolic in terms of what it affords human society [2]. In recent years much emphasis has been placed on the complexity of landscapes and the need for transdisciplinary collaboration to capture a landscape’s multi-layered eco-social feedback loops [3–6]. However, such systems-based approaches tend to preserve the language typically used in subjectivist or objectivist methods, and so preserve the human-centred perspective inherent in these methods. Such approaches may be called holistic in that they acknowledge the greater whole of complex landscape systems, but they tend not to attribute inherent meaning to these systems, other than perhaps indirectly when describing them, for example, as ‘self-organising’ [3, 7]. In this paper we wish to explore a relational understanding in which landscape is considered part of the communication taking place between living beings, not merely a substrate for it. Such an approach has objectivist aspects in that it considers landscape qualities to be real,– and includes subjectivist aspects in recognising that this reality, as communication, requires human engagement. However it aims to reach beyond the subject/object, inside/outside dichotomy, to better reflect the dynamics of how sentient organisms actually live, through continuously responsive, expressive communication with all that surrounds them [8–10]. Historically the very term ‘landscape’ already reflects an intention to physicalise and contain natural organisation, as if plants and animals in their habitats collectively are nothing but a physical territory [4]. But there are alternative formulations. Following indigenous hunter-gatherers, anthropologist Tim Ingold [11,12] proposes we might understand landscape not as a terrain to live in or on, but as a dynamic process of living with, a ‘dwelling together’ of natural entities in continuous co-development and co-formation. Anthropologist David Anderson [13] describes indigenous people’s practice of such ‘living with’ nature as ‘sentient ecology’. Other pioneering thinkers on the participative nature of our life-world are Arne Naess [14], David Abram [15], and Margaret Colquhoun [16], to name but a few. These writers all argue in various ways that a landscape’s expressive qualities are as primary and natural as its physical quantities, and should be given serious academic consideration. This is not, it should be noted, the same as granting landscapes individual agency and emotional experience as is done with humans and animals. But it is to recognise that psychological relationship emerges not merely within us, but with us, around us, in how acting and responding organisms collectively create and perceive landscape [15,17]. As landscape architect and planner Anne Whiston Spirn [18] puts it in her book ‘The Language of Landscape’: “Landscape has mean (...truncated)