A prototype method to map the potential visual-amenity benefits of new farm woodlands

In many developed countries forest cover is growing and forestry policy is increasingly focused on the provision of nonmarket benefits such as recreation, biodiversity, and visual amenity. The amount of benefit provided by new woodland is not only dependent on the (site level) design of the woodland, but also on its location in the wider landscape. This poses a challenge for policymakers, who, in order to allocate limited resources efficiently, have to target areas in which the efforts or costs of planting are relatively low and the benefits of planting are relatively high. The adoption by policymakers of such methods of spatial targeting has been hampered by a lack of established methods with which to map the various nonmarket benefits in a policy-relevant way. In this paper I develop a new GIS (geographic information system)-based method to map the potential visual-amenity benefits of new small-scale woodlands, on the basis of criteria of visibility, size, and location of the viewing population, and public preference for wooded landscapes. A case study in Scotland, relating to an existing publicly funded afforestation scheme, is used to demonstrate how this map can serve as an important criterion for the selective allocation of planting subsidies, thus helping to provide a better (visual-amenity) value for (taxpayers') money.