The index of the Prognosis Rural Landscape Preferences (IPRLP) as a tool of generalizing peoples' preferences on...

Social preferences of visual landscape quality are commonly analysed based on diverse techniques, among which the assessment of landscape photographs are the most often applied. Such evaluation is affected by the presence, configuration, colour, texture, etc. of different landscape attributes combined with respondent characteristics such as level of education, gender, age and environmental attitudes. The complexity of factors affecting preferences for visual quality raise the question of whether the objectifying of this kind of research is possible. That is why the aim of this paper is to determine if it is possible to generalise peoples' preferences on rural landscapes. This study developed the Index of Prognosis Rural Landscape Preferences (IPRLP), which is composed of nine variables referring to the presence or percentage share of different landscape attributes. The IPRLP was tested on 32 scenes of two regions located in Central Eastern Poland - the Polesie region and the Roztocze region. The index values were compared with real preferences expressed by respondents (n = 240). The results showed that this index was highly correlated with the respondents' preferences (0.79 < r < 0.90), which indicates that objectivity of visual preferences studies are possibly based on the mathematical model. Stepwise multiple regression indicates three explanatory variables of the model: percentage of buildings (PB), presence of negative manmade objects (NE) and degree of naturalness (DN) indicating that it is easier to predict what kind of landscape people would not prefer than would prefer.