Visualisation Techniques for Envisioning Landscape Futures

Visualisation technologies offer a means for enhancing the scientific communication of existing conditions and likely landscape scenarios to various stakeholder groups including communities, natural resource managers, and policy-makers. This paper provides some background description of visualisation including definitions and discussion of visualisation as a connecting science. Next, the paper provides a categorisation of visualisation types suitable for envisioning past, present and future landscape scenarios. In total fourteen visualisations types are described with annotated examples. The research has been conducted in the context of scoping alternative visualisation techniques to be applied in the Lower Murray River Basin (Australia) for visualising alternative landscape futures for both the river corridor and dryland mallee regions. The paper concludes by outlining future directions of the Department of Primary Industries Victoria in developing and applying visualisation techniques to agricultural and natural resource management based problems.