Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses

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    Change assessment in the post-war Mount Macedon landscape
    Menet, Urs ( 1986)
    Areas of scenic amenity close to urban centres, such as the Macedon Ranges and surrounds north-west of Melbourne, are increasingly exposed to land use conflicts. Residential developments and corresponding infrastructures oppose outdoor leisure activities of non-residents as well as the conservation of natural resources including water supply. As the trend of the demographic turnaround in rural areas is likely to continue, multiple land-use concepts necessarily have to adopt a fine balance between development and conservation based upon accurate information of space-time relationships. However, the fundamental understanding of change processes remains elusive. Studies dealing with landscape are static by using fragmentary descriptions. Systematic land-use reports are often confined to the single issue of land cover rather than placing the results into perspective of related environmental parameters. The base material for systematic monitoring of objects of spatial and temporal dimensions must be unbiassed and provide the consistency necessary for the defined area and periods. This leaves one reliable data source in the form of aerial photographs, which have a proven history of providing accurate, fast and inexpensive interpretation results over large areas. An arbitrary 25 ha-grid, which provides a common, cell basis for different data sets, is superimposed on the 282 km2 of the study area. The manual interpretation applies an overlay technique for assessing the quantitative and temporal manifestations of selected individual landscape artifacts (buildings, roads, dams and timber) on sequential aerial photographs of 1946, 1969, 1979 and 1985. The artifact developments are later regrouped, indexed and cross-tabulated with natural, social, economic and planning characteristics by statistical computer programs in order to evaluate change within the environment. The applied procedures provide significant insights into landscape change and they are potentially a flexible instrument for monitoring the effectiveness of planning decisions.