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A 2007 environmental assessment by the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment's (AFCEE) groundwater remediation program at the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod MA evaluated the feasibility of a wind turbine to be used for generating electricity. An important part of that assessment was consideration of the visual impact such a feature would have on the area surrounding the proposed turbine site, leading to the initial development of a viewshed analysis based on the area's glacial terrain. When the completed analysis was compared to actual field conditions it proved inadequate for honestly representing the potential visibility of the turbine because, in part, it failed to account for the significant impacts from forest cover, land use, and the region's human development. To address this, the initial analysis was extended by the addition of concentric distance zones derived from the Sinclair-Thomas matrix and further by the inclusion of land cover data taken from the National Land Cover Database. The resulting visibility analysis represents a more accurate depiction of the interactions between terrain, land cover, human development, and seasonal impacts on vegetation, and the affect these have on the potential visibility of the proposed wind turbine. |