Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Roca Honda Mine

Visual Resources
Affected Environment
Terminology and Methodology
Chapter 3. Affected Environment and Environmental Consequences
In environmental analysis, the term “visual resources” is often used interchangeably with “scenic
resources” or “aesthetics.” A visual resource is the interaction between a human observer and the
landscape he or she is observing. The subjective response of the observer to the various natural
and/or artificial elements of a given landscape and the arrangement and interaction between them
is fundamental to visual resources impacts analysis (USDA, 2007). A related term, “viewshed” is
a subset of a landscape unit and consists of all the surface areas visible from an observer’s
viewpoint. The limits of a viewshed are defined as the visual limits of the views located from the
proposed project. A viewshed also includes the locations of viewers likely to be affected by visual
changes brought about by project features (Caltrans, no date).
The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) manages 193 million acres of forest and grassland throughout the
country. The Agency has as mission “to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest
amount of people in the long run.” Accordingly, the Forest Service has developed a number of
tools to best manage its natural resources. One of the tools developed to manage its visual
resources is the Scenery Management System (SMS), detailed in “A Handbook for Scenery
Management.” The SMS was developed to provide a systematic approach for determining the
value and importance of scenery in a national forest (USFS, 1995). The SMS was developed as a
followup to the prior Forest Service’s Visual Management System (VMS). The Cibola National
Forest still has visual inventory from the VMS, and has not updated to the SMS. Therefore, we
will use the principles from the VMS to remain consistent with the “Cibola National Forest Land
and Resource Management Plan” (USFS, 1985). As part of the land and resource management
plan a visual inventory was conducted that categorized the resources, and set acceptable levels of
modification to the landscape. We will use these existing descriptions of the visual resources to
analyze project impacts in this section.
The VMS inventories the visual resource of the land by describing the Variety Class and
Sensitivity Level; and subsequently setting a Visual Quality Objective (VQO). The Variety Class
defines the physical features of the land by classifying the landscape into differing degrees of
variety. Those landscapes with the most variety potentially have the highest scenic values. The
Variety Classes are broken into Class A: Distinctive, Class B: Common, and Class C: Minimal.
Sensitivity Level is defined as the concern for scenic quality. This is described by how the
landscape is viewed, i.e. from the road, from trails, campgrounds, vistas, from recreating on the
water, etc. Generally people recreating will have a higher sensitivity to the landscape than
someone commuting to work. The Sensitivity Levels are Level 1 – Highest Sensitivity, Level 2 –
Average Sensitivity, and Level 3 – Lowest Sensitivity. Visual Quality Objectives then set the
degree of acceptable alteration of the natural landscape. The definition of each Visual Quality
Objective is described in table 70.
DEIS for Roca Honda Mine, Cibola National Forest 361