Foreword from the IEEE Victorian Section

Making decisions on landscape futures is challenging to decision makers as land uses have differing, often conflicting objectives. Appropriate landscape management is especially important in areas dominated by production forests and a range of potential scenarios can be developed by applying different management practices, in varying spatial patterns across the landscape. This paper describes a software system – ScenarioChooser – which allows the public to compare and select their most/least preferred forest management options from a set of eight developed scenarios. The scenarios are represented by a description of the applied management techniques, quantifiable landscape outputs and 3D panoramic views from selected areas. The landscape scenarios preferred by the participants showed significant variation both in applied harvest system and in proportion of land made available to harvesting. Analysis of the system interaction log show patterns of use and the type of information that was important in the decision process. Forest management; landscape; scenario; visualisation; panoramas