Analysis of Five Topics in Multi-Scale Identification of Landscape Characters in Europe

: [Objective] In the context of rapid globalization and urbanization, the decline of landscape has continued to capture attention worldwide while landscapes are losing their diversity, continuity and locality characters. How to protect, plan and manage landscape in a systematic way has become a constant issue. Landscape character has been defined as “a distinct, recognizable and consistent pattern of landscape elements that makes one landscape different from another, rather than better or worse”. As an effective tool for understanding the connotation of landscape, managing landscape change, and identifying landscape value, landscape character assessment (LCA) has been researched and carried out worldwide. Featuring the combination of subjectivity and objectivity, landscape characterization is one of the fundamental tasks in carrying out territorial landscape protection, planning and management. Most of the existing LCA researches focus on the identification stage for it is a prerequisite for assessment. More importantly, the connotations of LCA and the “Europe Landscape Convention” (ELC) pose challenges for synthesizing the relationship between qualitativeness and quantitativeness, and between subjectivity and objectivity in identification. This research aims to systematically sort out the relationship between qualitativeness and quantitativeness, and between subjectivity and objectivity in multi-scale identification, and to provide reference for whole area identification of landscape characters in China in the context of territorial spatial planning. [Methods] Based on literature induction and deduction, this research derives from the definition of landscape character in Europe five core questions with respect to the identification of landscape character: 1) Who identifies landscape character; 2) what are the elements included in landscape character; 3) how to perceive landscape character; 4) how to identify landscape character; and 5) how to express landscape character. On this basis, the research analyzes relevant cases of landscape character identification by induction and deduction, and takes scale variation as the carrier integrating subjective and objective attributes of landscape character and subjective judgments in landscape