East St. Louis Action Research Project
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Wetland

Wetland Development: Visual Evaluation

What’s the difference between a wetland and a swamp? Not much besides the negative connotation placed on a swamp and the positive connotation placed on wetland. A swamp is often viewed as an ugly place where insects and vermin are abound, offering little or no use to society. A wetland is often viewed as a place of natural beauty; a wildlife rich area in its most natural state. Wetlands and swamps are both the same thing, although the “eye of the beholder” will cause one individual to use the word “swamp” and one to use “wetland”

We feel that wetlands can be an aesthetically pleasing and beneficially contributing aspect of any region. But why is a wetland “beautiful” or “pleasing”. Wetlands combine many factors that are found to be visually pleasing by individuals. Trees, water, and wildlife have been found to generate the response of “That is beautiful” or “That’s pleasant to look at”. Wetlands contain all three aspects of these.

There may be some who question, “How do you know that everybody thinks these things are visually pleasing.” The answer, We don’t! But we do know that a significant group of people do have these feelings.

A visual evaluation survey was completed by our project group, to determine the “visual quality” of various scenes around East Saint Louis. Our group findings (described below) showed a tendency to give higher ratings for scenes with more vegetation, less development, and areas of water (other than the occasional puddle).

	What were we looking at? To give you an idea of images we looked at, this image was one of the higher rated images of the lot. Look for the large areas of vegetation and little development.
	This image was one of the lowest rated images for visual quality. Little vegetation, and stark development not fitting in well with its surroundings brought this image's ratings way down.

Now to justify our own opinions, we compared our results of our survey to those of a larger group study looking at the same East Saint Louis scenes. A pattern was determined that closely matched our own patterns; a preference for scenes with more vegetation, lower levels of development, and water.

What Does This Mean??? Well, ratings in bule were from our own visual analysis, while ratings in red were from the larger survey. Since the scales of the two surveys are different, the bars are different height. What to notice, however, is that the respective heights are similar, i.e. if we scored a particluar scene highly, it was often the case that the larger group survey did so as well!!!

With this in tow, we came to the conclusion that our evaluation for visual quality was on track with the general populaces (in general). We hoped to show that we could accurately predict what the general population would find visually pleasing or unpleasing. We feel we have done this. For this reason, we assume our evaluation of what a wetland could do aesthetically for the region would to some degree be in accordance with residents from the region.

To Sum Up...

Wetlands are pristine, beautiful places that once graced the majority of this state. Now they have become even more of a breath taking sight because of their scarceness. The city dweller may have little chance to interact within a natural setting.

In the East St. Louis Area, a wetland would be a very welcoming sight for many citizens and travelers. A wetland would provide the citizens of East St. Louis with a great natural aesthetic opportunity. Also, since the wetland could possibly be located near heavily traveled interstate highways, many people will get to experience the view of this developing wetland. The creation of a green corridor surrounding East St. Louis would be a asset to the community and a pleasant “doorway” into the community to travelers.

Take a look at our survey and our results from it.

Document author(s) : Andrea Davis, Rob Sperl, Brant Scheidecker
HTML by : us.
Last modified: 12/18/96

East St. Louis Action Research Project