Themes and trends in visual assessment research: Introduction to the Landscape and Urban Planning special collection on the visual assessment of landscapes

This paper introduces a Special Collection of 18 previously published articles in Landscape and Urban Planning and its parent journals on the topic of visual landscape quality assessment. To characterize the field and select papers for the collection we used automated and manual searches of the literature and the entire back catalog of this journal (1974-2018). Our analysis identifies and describes six thematic categories: conceptual and theoretical foundations, visual quality assessments, visual impact assessments, extension of visual assessments beyond scenic concerns, integration of visual-aesthetic values in multi-resource assessments, and use of landscape visualizations in visual assessments. Individual paper selections include key papers published on these themes along with exceptional recent work reflecting the states of the art.