Evaluation of landscape qualities with development guidelines of the Fužine municipality

The landscape of the municipality of Fužine is characterized as a mountainous landscape of rural settlements. The area faces problems of depopulation and pressures of tourism development on the environment. Basic premise of this paper is derived from the assumption that the values of the landscape are not fully recognized and can become endangered due to implementation of development projects. The aim of the paper is to identify highly valuable areas of the municipality‘s landscape in order to create guidelines for the development of the area, along with the project program that will preserve important features. The analysis of spatial planning and strategic documentation provides an overview of developmental guidelines, the position of planned interventions, the goals and visions of the progress of the municipality. The landscape evaluation is carried out through analysing the factors of the landscape – natural, anthropogenic and structural – with the available literature and spatial data. The product of analysis and evaluation are models, created using the GIS tool of the QGIS application. Based on the analysis, landscape quality modelling was carried out with the ProVal2000 program, where the factors were grouped in order to evaluate the natural-ecological, social-cultural and visual-experiential qualities of the landscape, with combined quality model indicating where the most valuable spatial zones with high quality landscape features are.