Impact of forest management activities on forest aesthetics using photogrammetric point cloud

Bryan Begay; Stephen Fitzgerald; Bogdan Mihai Strimbu

doi:10.15287/afr.2026.4438

Authors

Bryan Begay 1 College of Forestry, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA.
Stephen Fitzgerald 1 College of Forestry, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA.
Bogdan Mihai Strimbu 1 College of Forestry, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA. | 2 Bioinformatics Department, National Research and Development Institute for Biological Sciences, Bucharest, Romania.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15287/afr.2026.4438

Keywords:

photogrammetric point clouds, harvest visibility, univariate analysis, multi-variate analysis, Pacific Northwest

Abstract

Public concern over clearcutting in the United States during the 1970s led to significant changes in natural resource policies, particularly in forest management. One aspect that came under scrutiny was forest aesthetics. This study aims to assess the impact of different harvest designs on stand aesthetics using photogrammetric point clouds (PPC). To evaluate the effectiveness of PPC for forest visualization, two stands in the McDonald-Dunn Research Forest at Oregon State University were selected due to their potential to negatively impact the visual quality of the surrounding scenery during harvesting. The number of trees, their heights, volume, and area were analyzed using both univariate and multivariate methods. Regardless of the analysis type (i.e., univariate and multivariate), the designs were consistently differentiated by the percentage of the area harvested. Canonical Discriminant Analysis revealed that designs tailored to the terrain, such as "strips" and "islands," effectively occluded the visibility of forest operations, showing negative discriminant values. More complex harvest designs, aimed at screening forest operations with innovative mechanisms like an inundation model, also demonstrated the most negative discriminant values in visibility metrics. Because reduced ground exposure is only a proxy for visual impact, and not a direct measure of aesthetic preference, the visibility metrics are interpreted here as indicators of the potential to screen operations rather than as measures of scenic quality. The study found that, for the two stands examined, removing up to 75% of the trees could markedly reduce, and in some layouts nearly eliminate, the visibility of the harvest from the surrounding landscape. Because these results derive from two simulated case-study stands, they should be regarded as a promising decision-support approach.

Author Biographies

Bryan Begay, 1 College of Forestry, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA.

Mr. Begay is a Navajo forester that woks for the US Forest Service as a wildlife specialist. He received an MS from Oregon State University in Sustainable Forest Management with a focus in Geospatial Sciences, particularly aesthetics.
Stephen Fitzgerald, 1 College of Forestry, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA.

Prof. Fitzgerald is a retired forester who served for more than a decade as the Director of the Oregon State University Research Forest. He was a member of the Forest Engineering, Resources, and Management department at Oregon State, where he conducted many research studies and supervised a multitude of graduate students.

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