Planners, designers, governmental agencies, and citizens are interested in evaluating environmental quality. However, environmental quality is often quite intangible and difficult to be described quantitatively. Nevertheless, the hypothesis for this research is that: one can predict landscape aesthetic qualities of the Lower Muskegon Watershed by producing a statistically validated landscape visual quality map, meaning that a generated predictive map of visual quality is highly concordant with real images in the watershed. To construct the predictive map, photos were taken in the study area, their visual quality was measured with an equation developed by Burley (1997), then matched to land-uses on the map, and thus the land-uses had a visual quality score across the study area. With another set of photographs from the study area, the scores of the photographs were compared with the predictions of the map, employing Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance. The results suggest that the predictions (land-use map based scores) and the real photographs are in concordance and significant to a high (95%) confidence level, which supports the hypothesis.
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