The Landscape Inventory of Galicia (NW Spain): GIS-web and public participation for landscape planning

Abstract

The European Landscape Convention recognises the importance of public participation for landscape planning in order to capture local knowledge, sensitive issues and conflicts, boost exchanges of information and democratise the process. However, traditional public participation methods are frequently restricted to public exposure at the final stage of the planning process. New public participation movements call for a greater role for the people at all stages. The growing development of ICT and geospatial information technologies provides new means of improving the participation process. This paper describes the public participation procedure and the participation geographic information system used to develop the Landscape Inventory of Galicia, whose results were used for the characterisation of landscape types, the delimitation of special interest areas from the locations identified by citizens and the definition of special attention areas from the degraded areas located by population.