LIGHTNING ROUND PRESENTER CO-AUTHORS: Francesca Sanchez and Tom Nedland, WDNR TITLE: Assessing factors determining perception of natural beauty of Wisconsin wetlands ABSTRACT: Natural scenic beauty is identified as a wetland water quality standard in Wisconsin AdministrativeCode (s. NR 103.02) as one of several wetland functional values to be considered in permitting decisions. However, the Wisconsin Department of Natural resources (WDNR) lacks a calibrated tool to integrate natural scenic beauty into its regulatory process. We developed a decision-support tool to address this gap by quantifying the effects of wetland landscape features on public perceptions of scenic beauty. We compiled a catalogue of 100 photographs encompassing a range of wetland types, and the biophysical attributes captured in the images were coded. An online survey, which was pretested by 32 WDNR staff, was administered to a panel of 900 Wisconsin residents. Survey participants rated the scenic beauty of 21 photographs randomly selected from the full catalogue, as well as a common set of four photographs seen by all participants. We standardized these ratings using the Scenic Beauty Estimation method and applied multivariate linear regression to estimate the effects of coded features. For WDNR staff, the most important drivers included active farming, hills, immature forest, anthropogenic structures, plant diversity, and invasive vegetation. For the online panel, important drivers included hills, dead vegetation, mature forest, sedge meadow, and invasive vegetation. While WDNR staff were largely homogenous in their perceptions, latent class analysis revealed six groups within the online panel defined by which landscape features drove their aesthetic preferences. These results provide information to allow managers to anticipate potentially conflicting views on decision outcomes. BIO: Ben Beardmore has been a social scientist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) since 2014. Dr. Beardmore holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the McGill University, a master’s degree and PhD from the interdisciplinary School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, and a post-doc with UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology.