Human alteration of the rural landscape: Variations in visual perception

The objective of this investigation is to evaluate how visual perception varies as the rural landscape is altered by human interventions of varying character. An experiment is carried out using Semantic Differential Analysis to analyse the effect of the character and the type of the intervention on perception. Interventions are divided into elements of “permanent industrial character”, “elements of permanent rural character” and “elements of temporary character”, and these categories are sub-divided into smaller groups according to the type of development.To increase the reliability of the results, the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient tool, is applied to validate the semantic space of the perceptual responses and to determine the number of subjects required for a reliable evaluation of the scenes.