Scenic Quality

The InVEST Scenic Quality model assesses the visual quality of a landscape based on sited or planned features that impact visual quality. The model allows you to value scenic quality in a variety of ways, such as the number of “viewer days” per year or the monetary value of a change in scenic quality using valuation functions from peer-reviewed literature. With these features, the tool can produce sophisticated impact assessments. If you have a research question about where to site a feature that impacts scenic quality, the tool can pull in information about where people are on a landscape to assess what they can see across the landscape to determine the optimal siting location. This open source tool was designed to be flexible but powerful to answer a wide array of questions for any landscape.