Visual aesthetic analysis of post-mining area for ecotourism destination

Mining area of Pongkor Mountain has various kinds of landscape characters. Those landscapes consist of 15 types of land covers, 5 kinds of landforms and 43 of landscape characters that could be identified from previous researches. The characters of the landscapes hold various visual aesthetic values of ecotourism. The beauty, uniqueness, and distinctiveness of these landscapes have become attractive for visitors to get involved in ecotourism activities. The purpose of this research is to analyse the visual aesthetic of Pongkor post-mining landscape for ecotourism. The research method used was descriptive qualitative with the analysis methods of scenic beauty estimation (SBE) and semantic differential (SD). The land covers that have the high value of SBE are mixed plantation area, vegetation area, road network, and river. The land covers that have low value of SBE are the areas of community fish ponds. The green open space and natural landscapes hold outstanding visual aesthetic values for ecotourism. On the contrary, constructed spaces have less valuable visual aesthetic values for ecotourism. Evaluating visual aesthetic character of the landscape is important in order to develop ecotourism. It is expected that the promoting of ecotourism activities are carried out in the landscapes holding the quality of characters which are interesting, strong, comfortable, harmonious, gentle, bright, somewhat shady, wide, open, somewhat safe, and simple.