Dissertation Title: Temporally dynamic viewscapes for modeling the past and future of visual landscape amenities

Advisor: Dr. Jelena Vukomanovic, Faculty Fellow, Center for Geospatial Analytics; Assistant Professor, Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management

Abstract: The visual connection humans make with the 3-dimensional elements of their surrounding landscape––known as a viewscape––is the primary way people connect with the environment. Recent advances in computing and greater availability of 3-dimensional land cover data have opened opportunities for incorporating precise high-resolution visibility models into human-landscape studies. However, though viewscape models have become more precise in representing vegetation obstructions and the built environment, they are still commonly modeled as a single snapshot in time. With the evolving capacity to model large numbers of realistic viewscapes, there are significant opportunities to fuse viewscape analysis with backcasting and forecasting methods to understand the temporal dynamics of landscape visibility. This dissertation explores those dynamics by first quantifying common uses and methods of visibility analysis in peer-reviewed literature, then leveraging high-resolution surface models, high-performance computing and model coupling techniques to explore the temporal dynamics of landscape visibility via both past and future viewscapes.