Landscape Visualization: Its Application for Participatory Decision Making

The process of engaging communities, stakeholders, and the public in decision making has been always a crucial factor in natural resource management. Recently, most environmental research, assessments, or modeling do not conduct without some sort of reference to stakeholders and their involvement in the process. Although this is a positive development, in a myriad of cases, stakeholders’ engagement has been quite nominal, and complete successful engagement is barely achievable. There are various restrictions that cause unwillingness for the public to participate. So, here an important question comes up. What are the best approaches which increase public participation for mitigating environmental problems and enhancing nature-friendly attitudes and behaviors in society while they meet the aims of participatory methods? Some scholars advocate that visualization can improve understanding of the participants about potential plans, and enhance their ability to communicate their knowledge and ideas. In other words, the use of visualization can fulfill the criteria of an engaging participatory approach, fill the gaps between planners and the public, and provide a common language among them. Visualization is a graphical approach for displaying information and can be referred to as any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. The general procedure of visualization is to turn raw data into visual components. Currently, I am reviewing the application of visualization in some participatory management and decision making at different times, and parts of the world with various stakeholders and planners.