ReviewReview of cultural heritage indicators related to landscape: Types, categorisation schemes and their usefulness in quality assessment

•There are many concept of cultural heritage.•Most of cultural heritage indicators (CHI) are of state character.•Most of studies adopted only quantitative CHI and state indicators.•There is a lack of an ideal political and related to perception CHI.•There are many useful ecological, economic, social, visual and spatial CHI.

The concept of cultural heritage is very broad, including: built-heritage, physiognomy of landscape as well as diverse intangible cultural values. Therefore, numerous diverse cultural heritage indicators (CHI) have been developed so far. Given this diversity and the lack of comprehensive studies summarising the developments in this field, this manuscript aims to fill this gap by: (1) analysing recent studies which refer to the elaboration and implementation of CHI (48 papers); (2) defining what kinds of categorisation schemes have been used recently and what factors determine their selection; (3) selecting the most useful indicators for planning and managing cultural landscape. Among the variety of concepts, approaches, methods, and indicator types, an overwhelming majority of CHI are state indicators, highlighting the need for further development of pressure indices. Most of the studies adopted only quantitative measures (54%), and more than half of the papers (52%) used only state indicators. The factors determining the choice of indicators included: the concept of cultural heritage, scientific background of researchers, goal of research, the availability of data, and the research approach. Based on four criteria (reliability, measurability, stability and applicability), the analysis showed the lack of an ideal indicator related to the quality of political actions, as well as perception dimensions. There are many useful measures referring to ecological quality, economic relevance, social support, visual and spatial quality.