PEOPLE, RESOURCES AND TIMING
It is important to judge the people and skills needed and time required to complete the Landscape Character Assessment. Skills and time inputs, together with the scale and level of detail of the work, ultimately determine the cost of an assessment. Even a relatively modest Landscape Character Assessment, involving a limited range of professional and stakeholder inputs, and not making use of GIS technology, can help inform policy-making in many situations.

Stakeholder involvement
In defining the scope of an assessment, decisions will be needed about the nature of stakeholder participation (see Topic Paper 3 for details), including:

the range of stakeholders to be involved;

the stage of work they will contribute to;

the methods to be used to secure their participation.

Skills needed
Landscape Character Assessment requires inputs from a number of specialist areas, including landscape history and archaeology, ecology, agriculture, forestry and planning. It is important that the bulk of the work is carried out by a core team with complementary skills, such as a landscape specialist and a planner. They can carry out the majority of the desk study and field survey and keep an overview of the process and the products. Specialist inputs from others can then be introduced as necessary. GIS skills are also increasingly important, as are facilitation skills to support stakeholder involvement.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are playing a growing part in Landscape Character Assessment as tools in the process. Access to hardware and software, and the availability of digital data sets relevant to landscape character, have both improved. This means that it will become more commonplace for the different steps in Landscape Character Assessment to be carried out, to varying degrees, using GIS. The use of computer technology will largely depend on the scale at which the work is being carried out, the skills and resources available, and how much of the baseline data is already available in digital form. It is particularly helpful in handling different layers of mapped information which may be at different scales and interrogating these for interrelationships. GIS also has the advantages of:

allowing high quality presentation of mapped information;

linking to databases and therefore providing a system for data storage,
retrieval and analysis;

providing a flexible output that can be updated and refined as more information
becomes available.

Use of GIS and methods of computer analysis should not, however, be at the expense of proper consideration of the perceptual and aesthetic factors which influence character. Nor should it distract from the need to engage stakeholders in meaningful ways. Use of computer technology, including GIS, is reviewed in more detail in Topic Paper 4.

Seasons and timing
Landscape changes with the seasons, both in its physical appearance and how it is perceived. Assessments should, as far as possible, cover more than one season and, at the very least, should not normally be undertaken in the dead of winter when days are short and light conditions are often unsuitable for survey and photography. Where it is unavoidable that the field survey is carried out in mid-winter, verification in other seasons should ideally be undertaken.