How do we Rate? Taking a Look at Data from the National Park Service Visual Resources Inventory

Peters, M; Taylor, K; Meyer, M

The national park system preserves and protects a wide variety of landscape types and visual settings enjoyed by over 300 million visitors every year. To understand and help protect these special places, the National Park Service (NPS) developed a visual resource inventory (VRI) system that identifies the visual quality (through a Scenic Quality Rating), and the values that make views important to the parks and their visitors (though a View Importance Rating). The Scenic Quality Rating and View Importance Rating are combined to create a Scenic Inventory Value (SIV) for the view. The VRI helps parks establish baseline values about their views and can help parks communicate those values to partners and stakeholders. The VRI also lays a consistent groundwork to use for visual impact assessment to determine how potential changes in the views might affect the baseline values and the visitor experience. The NPS visual resource program initiated its first inventory in the summer of 2014. As of January 2019, over 35 parks have conducted VRIs and collected data on more than 650 views. This presentation will review the VRI results to date and examine the distribution of SIV values across the national park system and the relative contribution of scenic quality and view importance across all inventoried locations and landscapes.