introductionmain trend of ecotourism is nature and its beauties; so finding the beautiful landscapes and evaluating aesthetic values of the area would be considered as one of the principles of recreational planning. scenic beauty is a major component of every encounter with the natural environment in tourism and recreation activities. visual elements of landscape not only present aesthetical va...

Preferences for developing 3600 MW offshore wind farms in Denmark are estimated based on data from a choice experiment. The variation willingness to pay the location of power development at 8, 12, 18, or 50 km shore is analysed as function gender, age, education, income, turbine viewshed, and beach visits. With space mixlogit model, we find that varies significantly income level, viewshed farms...

Given a terrain model, the viewshed from a viewpoint is computed as the set of X-Y positions of a point target such that the target is visible. We introduce a novel approach to the computation of accurate viewshed approximations. Our algorithm relies on the computation of an approximation to the so-called line-of-sight (LOS) function. This function is defined over target X-Y positions, and is t...

Solar Radiation is considered as an important parameter in modeling environmental, hydrologic and biophysical processes. One of the reasons that solar radiations are not extensively used in models is the problem of its measurement in different points. Solar Analyst Viewshed Algorithm makes possible calculation of the topographic effects on solar radiation at local and landscape scales. With res...

Many interesting application problems on terrains involve visibility computations; for example, the search for optimal locations of observation points, line-of-sight communication problems, and the computation of hidden or scenic paths. The solution of such problems needs techniques to answer visibility queries on a terrain eeciently, and/or the development of data structures encoding the visib...

Viewshed analysis, often supported by Geographic Information Systems (GIS), is widely used in many application domains. However, as terrain data continue to become increasingly large and available at high resolutions, data-intensive viewshed analysis poses significant computational challenges. General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) provides a promising means to address...

The selection of the minimal number of observers that ensures the maximum visual coverage over an area represented by a digital elevation model (DEM) have great interest in many fields, e.g., telecommunications, environment planning, among others. However, this problem is complex and intractable when the number of points of the DEM is relatively high. This complexity is due to three issues: 1) ...