• Energy Research

Although there are clear economic and environmental incentives for producing. energy from solar and wind power, there can be local opposition to their installation due to their impact upon the landscape. To date, no international guidelines exist to guide quantitative visual impact assessment of these facilities, making the planning process somewhat subjective. In this paper we demonstrate the development of a method and an Open Source GIS tool to quantitatively assess the visual impact of these facilities using line-of-site techniques. The methods here build upon previous studies by (i) more accurately representing the shape of energy producing facilities, (ii) taking into account the distortion of the perceived shape and size of facilities caused by the location of the observer, (iii) calculating the possible obscuring of facilities caused by terrain morphology and (iv) allowing the combination of various facilities to more accurately represent the landscape. The tool has been applied to real and synthetic case studies and compared to recently published results from other models, and demonstrates an improvement in accuracy of the calculated visual impact of facilities. The tool is named r.wind.sun and is freely available from GRASS GIS AddOns. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc All rights reserved.

Abstract A systematic inventory of landslide events over regional spatial scales and through time is required for investigating changes in landslide frequency along-side changes in landslide triggers. This paper describes the methods used to compile a European-wide landslide inventory and some of the methodological and practical obstacles that inhibit better use and development of such inventories. We argue that these methods can be used more widely to provide a comprehensive picture of landslide populations and to further enrich our understanding of the impact of climate change and other drivers on landslide frequency and magnitude.