The need to protect and preserve the experience of natural, cultural, and scenic resources is becoming a global imperative for land managers. The visual setting of the surrounding landscape holds just as much value as the individual resource. In recent years adjacent development has greatly increased, encroaching on and compromising the experience of these important features and the setting in which they exist.
As part of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) mandate to manage scenic resources of public lands under its care, it is the BLM’s responsibility to identify, administer, and protect cultural heritage resources. The BLM currently administers 245 million surface acres of public land and 700 million acres of split estate subsurface minerals, primarily in the western United States.
The goal of this handbook is to provide guidance on effective strategies for manipulating color for visual mitigation of development. Keep in mind, however, that color is only one of several visual characteristics used to mitigate visual impacts. For effective visual mitigation, color should be combined with the manipulation of texture, line, form, and scale.
Supplement to BLM Technical Note 446