Marine Policy 62 (2015) 218–223

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Marine Policy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/marpol

Incorporating the visibility of coastal energy infrastructure into

multi-criteria siting decisions
Robert Griffin a,n, Nicolas Chaumont a, Douglas Denu a, Anne Guerry b, Choong-Ki Kim c,
Mary Ruckelshaus b
a
The Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, 371 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, United States
b
The Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, c/o School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Box 352100, Seattle, WA 98195,
United States
c
Division of Natural Resources Conservation, Korea Environment Institute, 370 Sicheong-daero, Sejong-si, 339-007, Korea

art ic l e i nf o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Concern about the visibility of large infrastructure development often drives public opposition to these
Received 17 August 2015 projects. However, insufficient analytical tools to assess visibility across a large number of alternate sites
Received in revised form prior to siting typically results in the omission of visibility in multi-criteria siting processes, leading to
18 September 2015
inferior site selection and often costly litigation. This paper presents an approach for deriving visibility
Accepted 18 September 2015
Available online 30 September 2015
maps based on the location and duration of viewing by residents and visitors and demonstrates its use in
illuminating tradeoffs by comparing these maps to wind energy value maps in the context of offshore
Keywords: wind energy development in the Northeastern United States.
Marine spatial planning & 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
Viewshed
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Visibility
Wind energy
Siting

1. Introduction Public opposition to infrastructure development imposes a fi-

Visual features on the landscape play significant and wide-
ranging roles in people’s lives. Research has found links between
nature viewing and many aspects of well-being [1,2], real estate
prices and views [3,4], and a general public preference for natural
and agricultural views accompanied by modest levels of devel-
opment [5,6]. Recent high profile opposition to offshore wind
farms in the U.S. and Europe has demonstrated how visual impacts
can play a significant role in determining the level of public sup-
port for large scale development in sparsely developed land and
seascapes [7–10]. Commonly standing 100 m or more, wind tur-
bines are visible from as far as 30 km away [11]. The exposure that
produces favorable wind conditions coincides with high inherent
visibility and the potential for negative visual impacts to neigh-
boring communities. Evidence from communities adjacent to
land-based wind farms indicates that, while support for develop-
ment is conditional on many factors [12], visibility concerns are
consistently and frequently cited [13,14]. In coastal settings they
are a top concern [7,15] and surveys have shown that coastal re-
sidents [16–18] and visitors [19,20] are willing to pay to site wind
farms further from shore where they are less visible.
n
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rmgriff@stanford.edu (R. Griffin).
nancial burden on local communities and developers via costly
litigation and, in the context of wind energy, threatens the growth
prospects of a globally important renewable energy source. De-
spite this, landscape-level siting decisions for wind energy devel-
opment are largely conducted without formal consideration for
visibility prior to the siting decision. While visual impact analysis
has reached a remarkable degree of sophistication over the last 30
years [21], the post-hoc nature of this analysis means that site
selection is missing potentially important impacts and tradeoffs
related to visibility, resulting in social welfare losses even in the
absence of litigation [22].
To incorporate visibility considerations into infrastructure sit-
ing requires inverting the traditional lens of analysis from asses-
sing visibility from a given point source to assessing where people
in the study area can see over the landscape. The 360° range of
visibility from an observation point, commonly known as a view-
shed, is limited by such factors as the acuity of the human eye,
intervening topography, the curvature of the earth, and weather.
In the fields of landscape planning and archeology, overall land-
scape visibility has been conceptualized by the term cumulative
viewsheds, the aggregate visibility from multiple observation
points [23]. This approach is beginning to attract attention in siting
infrastructure [24,25]; however to-date it has been conducted only
from the perspective of a handful of observation points – generally
scenic overlooks and population centers.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2015.09.024
0308-597X/& 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
 R. Griffin et al. / Marine Policy 62 (2015) 218–223 219

Fig. 1. Distribution of visitors across the study area from geotagged photos. Rhode Island state waters around Block Island are shaded blue. High concentrations of visitors
can be seen in the town center (largest concentration of red and orange cells), and the two lighthouses (north and southeast). Note the route that the ferry takes from the
mainland (line of green cells to the north) and a popular recreational fishing location (concentration of green cells to the SE).

This paper expands the cumulative viewshed approach to
provide a more comprehensive accounting of where people are
over space and time to significantly improve visibility estimates
for planning in wind energy and other infrastructure siting deci-
sions. This first requires information about places where people
live and visit – two proxy datasets for where residents and visitors
spend most of their time [25]. The locations of residences in the
case study presented in this paper are based on maps created to
enhance emergency response that combine both field surveys and
orthophotography; however, many other potential data layers may
be useful for this purpose. To estimate the relative spatial dis-
tribution of visitors to the study area (Fig. 1), the case study ex-
ample here employs a global dataset of geotagged photos from a
popular photo-sharing site that has been shown to provide an
accurate proxy for the spatial distribution of visitation [26]. These
relative visitation maps are calibrated to nominal visitation maps
using surveyed visitation data to the area. While no dataset can
ever fully represent the exact location, orientation, and duration of
viewing for all viewers in an area, incorporating visitors is a novel
addition to visual impact assessment that captures more of the
inherent complexity in landscape viewing patterns. The residence
and visitation data are inputs to a conventional viewshed algo-
rithm that aggregates the resulting individual viewsheds to gen-
erate cumulative viewshed maps.
The context of a previously completed offshore wind farm sit-
ing decision near Block Island, Rhode Island was selected as a
heuristic demonstration of the core methodology of this cumula-
tive viewshed approach and its use in multi-criteria spatial plan-
ning. Block Island is a small (25 km2) island located 21 km off the
coast of mainland Rhode Island that is home to approximately
1000-year-round residents and a destination for over 30,000
people on a busy summer holiday weekend. The island is re-
presentative of many locations on the U.S. east coast and world-
wide where favorable wind energy resources are located: it is
close enough to potential wind farm locations such that visibility
issues are a primary concern; it has a highly variable population
throughout the year that is comprised of permanent residents,
summer residents, and tourists; and finally, it has a high cost of
energy that incentivizes locals to support wind energy projects
[27,28]. A lengthy state-level planning effort [29] has led to the
approval of a demonstration-scale wind farm that likely will be the
first commercial offshore wind facility operating in the U.S. To
demonstrate the use of these cumulative viewshed maps for siting,
the outputs of a spatial wind energy value model are compared to
cumulative viewshed maps where visibility is measured in viewer
days, a quantitatively meaningful metric that accounts both for
spatial and temporal variation in visibility across different cate-
gories of viewers. This flexibility of this siting approach is also
demonstrated by drawing from the extensive visual impact lit-
erature to create cumulative visual impact maps that reflect
viewers’ preferences. The methods demonstrated here expand the
toolbox of planners to incorporate visibility into siting decisions
for features with a visual impact, and in the specific context of
offshore wind, allow for the comparison of tradeoffs between
visibility, wind energy value, and other objectives as part of a
multi-criteria spatial planning process.
2. Methods
2.1. Viewers
To characterize where people can see over space, a spatial in-
ventory of viewers over the landscape is required. There are
multiple potential data sources that can be used to spatially locate
viewers based in residences, including orthophotography, tax as-
sessment parcel maps, and maps created for public safety emer-
gency response. This flexibility increases the applicability of this
approach across a wide range of geographies. In the case of Block
Island, the state of Rhode Island has an E-911 vector data layer for
220 R. Griffin et al. / Marine Policy 62 (2015) 218–223
use in public safety programs that spatially identifies all structures
in Rhode Island that was created using field-verified orthophoto-
graphy. It includes the number of stories for each structure and the
street address, as well as classifications for whether it is a re-
sidential address or other class of structure. It also includes a sub-
category of whether or not it is a seasonal versus full-time re-
sidence. From this data, all structures on Block Island were ex-
tracted and the dataset was further reduced by eliminating all
structures that were not classified in the dataset as full-time
residences.1
Geotagged photos from the online photo hosting service flickr
(available via flickr’s public API) were employed to assess the
spatial distribution of where visitors or tourists aggregate. The
global coverage of these photos, the ability to avoid time-con-
suming and costly surveys, and photos’ inherent linkage to visual
landscape quality make them a useful data source in this context.
A comparison of independent empirical visitation to 836 sites in
31 countries against observed imputed visitation from flickr
showed strong correlations, demonstrating that these data can be
reliably used as a proxy for visitation [26]. Because visitors spend
time in the waters surrounding Block Island for activities such as
sailing, charter fishing, and transit from the mainland, all photos
taken on Block Island or in the marine areas defined by a
60x60 km2 bounding box centered on Block Island were included.2
This data includes the latitude and longitude, the user id, and the
date the picture was taken. For the study area there were 11,088
photos over the years 2005–2012, comprising 1456 unique user
days and 711 unique individuals. The median amount of days
taking photos in the area per user is one day, with 64% of users
falling into this category. Table S.1 shows the distribution of user
days for the dataset.
Wood et al. [26] found a strong correlation between user days
and field observations of visitation at 836 recreation sites around
the world, demonstrating that this dataset can be reliably used as a
proxy for visitation. However, the raw number of observed photo-
user-days significantly underestimates visitation, as naturally not
all visitors to a location take pictures and upload them to this
particular web service. The usefulness of these data is based rather
in how it characterizes the distribution of visitors over space. Ta-
ken as a proxy for the distribution of actual visitors to the area, it
can be combined with survey data on nominal visitation to pro-
vide quantitative estimates of visitation to different locations.
Global Insight [30] provides data on the number of visitors to the
1
This left 1058 structures, a significant difference from the 514 occupied
housing units identified by the 2010 U.S. census. Without a spatial layer identifying
the census housing units, the E-911 data is the best available resource to char-
acterize the spatial distribution of year-round residences, even if it significantly
overestimates their number. To partially address this, the 1051 full-time residents
identified by the 2010 U.S. Census across all year-round residential units were
evenly spread and each viewpoint received (1051/1058)*365 ¼362.6 viewing days
per year. This approach captures the spatial distribution of the year-round re-
sidences in the E-911 data while not overestimating the total number of viewer
days.
2
Included in this analysis are the full-time residents of Block Island and visi-
tors both on the island and in surrounding waters. Though the decision context
explored here is siting a wind energy facility in the state waters surrounding Block
Island, visitors recreating in the waters outside this area are included under the
assumption that they also will be affected and may likely be tied to Block Island’s
tourist economy. State waters to the north of Block Island extend to within 8 km of
the mainland and generally should be included in an analysis of this type. However
these viewers were not included for two reasons: first, while the particular case
study gives context, the siting decision here has already been made and therefore
this is a heuristic exercise to demonstrate the core cumulative viewshed metho-
dology; second, the wind energy analysis and visibility analysis made it clear that
locations to the north of Block Island were inferior to those to the south. Adding in
additional viewers that can only see the north side of the island would have done
nothing to change the outcome of this (retrospective) policy guidance or advance
demonstrating the approach.
island in 2009, indicating that there are 536,900 overnight visitors
and visitors from under 50 miles, or 379,300 overnight visitors not
including those from under 50 miles. Unfortunately the data are
ambiguous regarding the distribution in the length of stay, so
based on the observed flickr data the simplifying assumption was
made that the median length of stay is one day as observed in the
dataset (Table A.1).3 An additional assumption is that this field
visitation data reflects not only visitation to the island but also to
the surrounding waters. Much of the activity in surrounding wa-
ters, including passenger ferries, charter boats, and sailing is based
out of the island so this is a reasonable assumption. To assign each
viewpoint a number of total visitor days, the total number of
visitors (536,900) were divided by the number of photos, therefore
treating 11,088 photo locations from the flickr dataset equally and
assigning each as representative of approximately 48.5 visitor
days.
2.2. Viewer days and visual impact
Creating a quantitatively meaningful cumulative viewshed
from input datasets for visitor and resident locations requires that
the outputs of each viewshed be in the same terms. There are
many potential metrics that could serve as a potential common
denominator between visitors and residents, and the choice
should be informed both by how impacts are internalized by
viewers and also more practical considerations such as data lim-
itations, computing resources, and the nature of the questions or
decisions that will be made with the results. Based on existing
research and the limitations of available data, two approaches are
presented here: using viewer days and a visual impact index as the
output metrics for the cumulative viewshed analysis.
For all locations (cells) in an area of interest, viewer days re-
flects the number of days each viewer can see that particular lo-
cation and then sums those values across all viewers. This is a
quantitatively meaningful output of landscape visibility that
weighs residents’ viewing more than visitors’, addressing research
that has found heterogeneous and time-variant visual impacts to
different user groups [19]. Viewer days is also an intuitive and
transparent metric that should be readily understood by policy
makers and stakeholders, allowing involved parties to reflect on
their visual preferences during the iterative stakeholder engage-
ment process typical of nearly all successful spatial planning ef-
forts [31].
To expand the viewer days concept from a visibility metric to a
visual impact metric requires an understanding of viewers’ pre-
ferences for seeing development. Bishop and Miller [32] used a
multiple regression analysis with standardized coefficients to ex-
amine how different predictors influence the visual impact of
wind turbines, finding that distance has the largest effect. For the
purpose of demonstrating a visual impact preference map in this
cumulative viewshed framework, their regression results relating
distance to visual impact are employed here, holding other vari-
ables at their sample means, yielding the following distance–im-
pact relationship:
I = 3.84 − 0.053D (1)
where I is the visual impact index that ranges from 1 (low impact)
to 5 (high impact), and D is the distance of the wind turbines in
kilometers from the viewer. In a cumulative viewshed analysis,
each individual viewshed raster is weighted by this function prior
3
By tracking individual users in the flickr dataset a finer temporal resolution
could be created that breaks visitation time into hours; however, this level of detail
has not been validated against empirical data and would still be reliant on the
coarser field survey data for translation to total visitation time.
 R. Griffin et al. / Marine Policy 62 (2015) 218–223
Fig. 2. Comparison of favorable wind (left) and visibility (right) areas over the lifetime of the wind farm (20 years). The cross indicates the planned wind farm location. The
net present value map is negative throughout the area, characteristic for a demonstration-scale farm that is unable to take advantage of economies of scale. As a state-level
decision, the analysis is constrained to the waters surrounding Block Island up to three nautical miles. Net present value is given in 2012 U.S. dollars.
to being summed with other viewsheds. This process was auto-
mated using the InVEST Scenic Quality model, an open-source
viewshed tool created specifically for weighted viewshed analysis
[33].4
2.3. Model runs
In the study area, one-meter resolution LiDAR point cloud data
exists from which to derive elevation maps [36]. This data is from
airborne LiDAR data collection done between April 22 and May 6,
2011. At this latitude, this date captures a point somewhere be-
tween no- and full-foliage, providing a reasonable median ap-
proximation of surface contours throughout the year. Using the
ArcGIS LAS Dataset to raster tool, the point cloud data were pro-
cessed into a one-meter resolution digital surface model (DSM)
using binning interpolation with “maximum” cell assignment and
natural neighbor void fill. Maximum biases the results to higher
elevations by picking up higher elevation points that may be as-
sociated with trees and structures, important features to capture
for a viewshed model. At this resolution the study area includes
5 billion pixels, a significant computational burden for over 12,000
individual viewshed runs using a raster-based viewshed tool like
the ArcGIS viewshed tool, the chosen viewshed model for calcu-
lating viewer days. To reduce this burden, the DSM LiDAR data was
resampled to 10 m using bilinear interpolation. While this reduces
the fidelity of the data, it retains important surface features often
missing in bare earth digital elevation modeling.
To be comparable to the 20-year time horizon of the wind farm
the viewshed results were assumed constant across years and
multiplied by a factor of 20. A common refractivity coefficient of
0.13 is used for all viewshed runs to correct for distortions based
on the Earth’s atmosphere. Each individual’s maximum viewing
radius is set at 30 km for the planned 175 m tall (turbine þrotor)
Alstom 6.0 MW turbines in the demonstration wind farm [11].
Viewpoints representing visitors were assumed to extend 1.55 m
vertically above grade, eye-level of the average U.S. citizen
(1.55 m:1.69 m in height  .14 m for the distance between the top
of the head and the eyes). Viewpoints for residents were placed on
4
The model calculates raster-based viewsheds using the R2 method described
in [34], but computes the cells in the line of sight using Kreveld’s sweeping tech-
nique [35]. The R2 algorithm can compute visibility in time that is proportional to
the viewing radius squared by only computing the line of sight to perimeter cells
instead of the exact R3 algorithm that scales as a cubic function because it com-
putes the line of sight to every cell of the viewing area. Although it is an approx-
imate method, it is reported to be about 98.8% accurate compared to the exact R3
method [34].
221
top of structures with no above-grade adjustment. This approx-
imates (with a slight upward bias) the view from top-floor win-
dows of these properties, a likely representation of the best and
largest view from each property [37,38].
Wind energy value is given as the lifetime net present value
(NPV) of the approved wind farm configuration for all potential
siting locations in the study area, as estimated using the InVEST
Wind Energy model ([33,39], see Appendix). Due to both the high
cost of financing offshore wind energy projects and the high cost
per megawatt for demonstration-scale projects, the NPV for this
particular wind farm configuration is negative throughout the
study area.
3. Results and discussion
As the case study is a state-level decision for siting offshore
wind energy, here the analysis is restricted to the state waters
surrounding Block Island.5 Comparing spatial maps of visibility,
given in viewer days, and wind energy value side-by-side show
that the demonstration-scale farm was sited in a favorable location
for the two criteria of interest (Fig. 2). Locations to the south and
southeast of the island provide higher NPV for a farm of this de-
sign and also result in lower visibility due to the spatial distribu-
tion of viewers and the geomorphology of the southern part of the
island. Tradeoffs between NPV and visibility can be visualized by
representing siting locations as a scatter plot (Fig. 3). Points below
or to the left of the outer envelope in the lower plot indicate lo-
cations where either visibility or NPV could be improved at no cost
to the other. The outer envelope of points forms the efficiency
frontier for siting this wind farm configuration in the state waters
surrounding Block Island. Sites on the frontier represent optimal
combinations of visibility and wind NPV, and the concave negative
slope indicates the rate of tradeoff between the two in the set of
optimal solutions. Maximizing NPV comes at little cost to visibility
when moving from  $11.5 million to $10 million, but further
gains in NPV quickly increase the visibility of the farm. Although
the planned farm location is very close to the frontier, the plot
shows that an increase in NPV of roughly $0.75 million could come
5
For the sake of demonstrating the core cumulative viewshed approach, the
analysis presented here omits many other important siting considerations that
could significantly alter spatial prioritization, such as the location of commercial
fishing grounds, marine transport lanes, or restricted military zones [40]. None-
theless, these can be integrated alongside visibility as constraints or as additional
siting criteria in a multi-objective tradeoff analysis for infrastructure siting [22].
222 R. Griffin et al. / Marine Policy 62 (2015) 218–223
Fig. 3. Efficiency frontier for visibility and wind energy net present value. (Top) A
random sample of 10,000 combined wind energy value and viewer days across the
study area for the chosen farm configuration. (Bottom) Values at the outer
boundary of the top plot demonstrate the efficiency frontier of best possible out-
comes. Points towards the top of the figure indicate a decrease in visibility; points
to the right indicate increasing NPV. The axis for viewer days is inverted, reflecting
a preference for less visible wind energy infrastructure. The black cross indicates
the combined values for the planned wind farm location, near the edge of the
frontier.
at no cost to visibility. Similarly, a reduction of a million viewer
days could come at little cost to NPV. These are relatively small
gains compared to many of the other locations that could have
been chosen for this wind farm, which reflects well on the ex-
haustive planning process that resulted in this location being
chosen despite not having the advantage of the cumulative
viewshed model or the wind energy value maps.
For demonstrating impact-weighted cumulative viewsheds, the
InVEST Scenic Quality model was run with a coarser 100 m DSM
(resampled from the 1 m DSM) and only using the residence
viewpoints. Other values were held constant from the viewerdays
cumulative viewshed analysis. The results (Fig. 4) demonstrate the
visual impact of the demonstration scale wind farm across space.
As each pixel represents the cumulative visual impact at that lo-
cation, the values are no longer on a 1–5 scale as they are summed.
To the extent that the application of visual preferences for offshore
wind turbines from a study done elsewhere apply to Block Island,
this map demonstrates the decay of negative visual impact at in-
creasing distances from island residences. Bishop and Miller [32]
assessed visual preferences for offshore wind turbines by survey-
ing attitudes about hypothesized predictors that influence the
perceived visual impact of offshore wind turbines, such as con-
trast, distance from the viewer, rotor motion, and demographic
characteristics. Unsurprisingly, many of these factors played a role.
Demographics poses a particularly difficult challenge for creating
visual impact maps, versus visibility maps, in the presence of
Fig. 4. Cumulative viewshed using visual impact index weighting.
heterogeneous populations. There is considerable remaining re-
search necessary to integrate preference weighting into visual
impact analysis, and this visual impact exercise also abstracted
from important landscape context concerns which are still being
formalized in the literature [9,41]. Nonetheless, the cumulative
viewshed framework presented here is adaptable to the use of
visual impact indices and monetary value functions from will-
ingness-to-pay surveys [16,17,19,20] as this research progresses.
It is important to note that the analysis here is concerned only
with visibility and the visual impacts of infrastructure develop-
ment, not the entire suite of values that may be associated with an
undeveloped (or lightly developed) landscape. The concept of
“value” in economics is categorized by use and non-use value.
Visual impact is a type of use value, as the observer directly ex-
periences a change in their well-being from viewing a landscape.
Non-use value is commonly associated with wilderness and empty
spaces–people value these and would be willing to pay to keep
them wild (for example by prohibiting wind farms), even if they
never plan to visit these locations. It is important not to conflate
these sources of value – see the seminal paper by Walsh et al. [42]
on non-use value and wilderness for more on this distinction.
Estimating other use and non-use values arising from (the lack of)
development in a landscape is challenging but is supported by
other methods from more than 30 years of research in economics.
Cumulative viewshed results, regardless of the chosen output
metric, should be considered only as estimates of landscape visi-
bility. A primary reason for this is the process for attributing the
spatial and temporal attributes of viewers in the study area. This
will always provide an imperfect measure of the exact location
and duration of time spent viewing the landscape. Another im-
portant reason for this is that viewshed algorithms are computa-
tionally intensive and this burden increases exponentially as the
resolution of the inputs increases. This is a critical issue in cu-
mulative viewshed modeling when thousands of individual
viewshed runs are required across all the observation points.
Current software and hardware limitations require that some sa-
crifices in accuracy must be made to run a cumulative viewshed
analysis, one of the major reasons that this type of analysis is
under-studied.
A key advancement of this cumulative viewshed approach is
the fast and accurate production of landscape visibility maps prior
to siting decisions, a crucial missing capacity for planning at a time
when more than three dozen countries worldwide are starting or
continuing to develop marine spatial plans in reaction to ex-
panding use of coastal waters [43]. Marine aquaculture in parti-
cular is another visually sensitive and quickly growing use that is
being deliberated globally without advance consideration for vi-
sual impacts. While it has been introduced in an offshore wind
 R. Griffin et al. / Marine Policy 62 (2015) 218–223
energy siting context, the cumulative viewshed method here is
general and can be used in any siting decision where visual im-
pacts are a concern, from negatively perceived features such as
landfills, surface mining, timber clearcuts, and electrical infra-
structure to positively perceived features like monuments and
parks. This approach is especially useful in areas where siting
decisions are non-trivial from a visibility perspective, such as
when the geomorphology or distribution of viewers varies sig-
nificantly across space, a condition that holds at many coastal
wind energy installations.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Michele Spero and Martha Roldan at the
New Shoreham GIS office for providing parcel maps, Martin La-
cayo-Emery, Spencer Wood, and Dave Fisher for assistance with
the geotagged photo data, Rich Sharp for assistance with the In-
VEST Scenic Quality model, and Ben Bryant and Lisa Mandle for
early feedback on the manuscript. They also gratefully acknowl-
edge support for this research from The Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
Supplementary data associated with this article can be found in
the online version at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2015.09.024.
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