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Dynamic response of the scenic beauty value of different forests to various thinning intensities in central eastern China

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Abstract

Forest management has a significant influence on the preferences of people for forest landscapes. This study sought to evaluate the dynamic effects of thinning intensities on the landscape value of forests over time. Five typical stands in Wuxiangsi National Forest Park in Nanjing, China, were subjected to a thinning experiment designed with four intensities: unthinned, light thinning, moderate thinning, and heavy thinning. People’s preferences for landscape photographs taken in plots under various thinning intensities were assessed through scenic beauty estimation (SBE) at 2 and 5 years after thinning. The differences in scenic beauty value between different thinning intensities were then analyzed with a paired samples t test for the two periods. The results indicated that the landscape value of all of the thinned plots significantly exceeded that of the unthinned plots 2 years after thinning (p < 0.01) and that the heavily thinned plots were most appreciated, showing an average improvement of 9.71 % compared with the control plots. Additionally, the heavily thinned plots were judged to be more beautiful than the lightly thinned and moderately thinned plots, whereas there was no significant difference between moderate thinning and light thinning. At 5 years after thinning, however, the moderately thinned plots received the highest preference scores among the four intensities, displaying an average improvement of 11.32 % compared with the unthinned plots. A multiple linear regression (MLR) model indicated that landscape value improved with increases in the average diameter at breast height (DBH) and with the improvement of environmental cleanliness in the stand, whereas the value decreased with an increasing stem density, species diversity, litter coverage, and canopy density. In addition, we found that the performance of a neural network model based on a multilayer perception (MLP) algorithm for predicting scenic beauty was slightly better than that of the MLR model. The findings of our study suggest that moderate to heavy thinning should be recommended to manage forests for the improvement of forest landscape value.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 program, 2012CB416904) and the Special Public Interest Forestry Project of the State Forestry Administration of China (No. 201104075). We gratefully acknowledge all the staff members of the State-owned Forest Farm of Lishui Prefecture, Nanjing City for their support in the field survey and thinning experiment, and we thank all of the workers who helped perform the thinning treatments. We would like to thank a number of students from Nanjing Forestry University for their support in the field, in the plot investigations, and with the assessment experiments. In addition, we wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers and editor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Forest Measurement and Planning Laboratory, Agriculture Faculty, Shinshu University, 8304, Minamiminowa-vill., Kamiina-Dtrct, Nagano Prefecture, 399-4598, Japan

    Songqiu Deng & Masato Katoh

  2. Faculty of Forest Resources and Environment, Nanjing Forestry University, 159, Longpan Road, Nanjing, 210037, Jiangsu Province, China

    Songqiu Deng, Na Yin & Qingwei Guan

  3. Forest Environment and Ecology Laboratory, Agriculture Faculty, Shinshu University, 8304, Minamiminowa-vill., Kamiina-Dtrct, Nagano Prefecture, 399-4598, Japan

    Na Yin

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  1. Songqiu Deng
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Correspondence to Qingwei Guan.

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Deng, S., Yin, N., Guan, Q. et al. Dynamic response of the scenic beauty value of different forests to various thinning intensities in central eastern China. Environ Monit Assess 186, 7413–7429 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-014-3937-9

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