Demonstration of Impacts from Mojave National Preserve

While mountain tops and high-elevation landscape features may sustain heavy impacts to visual resources, impacts to views experienced by desert residents and visitors could be better assessed by determining visual impacts from road corridors and highly trafficked areas. Stakeholder groups (e.g., local municipalities, private landowners, land management agencies, and environmental groups) interested in specific visual resources could select a series of points from which to conduct viewshed analyses of individual facilities or facility development scenarios.

We were interested in seeing how solar development might affect views from national parks and other areas valued for their scenic qualities. We selected one observation point from a visitor use area in Mojave National Preserve from which a few solar facilities are visible, to serve as an example of further analyses that can be conducted from towns, roads, trails, and visitor use areas throughout the desert to predict impacts of proposed solar facilities to visual resources (Map 1).