Identifying cues for monitoring stewardship in Swedish pasture landscapes

•Features such as fences, patches of grass, edge zones, and wooded vegetation in pasture attracts attention to a high degree, emphasizing their role in the assessment of stewardship.•These results lend some support to the idea that there are general cues of stewardship when assessing pasture landscape.•The paper demonstrates how novel techniques from the cognitive sciences could help the development of landscape indicators with which to analyse aspects important for human well-being and landscape multifunctionality.

Perceived stewardship is an important factor driving people’s landscape preferences, and there is a need for landscape planning and monitoring tools to address this characteristic in landscape management. The European Landscape Convention emphasizes landscapes as perceived by people, so the political pressure to develop indicators suitable for monitoring landscape qualities related to perception has increased. This paper presents the results from a study that uses eye-tracking to explore what it is in the agricultural landscape that people look at when asked to evaluate stewardship. In the study, photographs of Swedish agricultural landscapes were shown to 19 respondents while their eye movements were recorded, and after each picture they were asked to evaluate the landscape in terms of stewardship using a 7-point Likert scale.