Welch Point, Bridgestone Firestone Centennial Wilderness WMA, White County. Photo by Chuck Sutherland
Scenic Tennessee invites the public to take part in Tennessee Vistas, a community-sourced initiative to identify, map, and help ensure the future of Tennessee’s most beloved and significant scenic views.
Individuals, organizations and agencies can nominate the views they consider essential to the character, history, economy, brand or overall quality of life in their region. Following community review, the top-ranked vistas will become part of a “Tennessee Scenic Viewshed Register” that organizers hope will be used in areas from tourism and promotion to education and long-range planning. A defined viewshed is everything visible when looking in one direction from a fixed viewing point.
“Tennessee is growing by half a million new residents every 10 years,” said Marge Davis, president of Scenic Tennessee and a board member of Scenic America. “We’re lucky to have such a strong economy, but we need to make sure we don’t lose the scenic qualities that help draw people here in the first place. This database can serve as a resource for local planning boards and other land-use decision-makers. If they choose to make use of it—for instance, to site a new park, or to reduce visual impacts when development is unavoidable—Scenic Tennessee and its partners can share expertise and resources. This project gives Tennesseans a say in what our landscapes look like 20, 30, or even 100 years from now.”
Tennessee Department of Tourist Development Commissioner Mark Ezell said that Tennessee’s natural beauty attracts visitors from around the globe.
“We applaud Scenic Tennessee’s work in helping identify and preserve these landmarks for generations to come,” Ezell said.
Modeled after a similar initiative developed for Scenic Virginia by landscape architects at Virginia Tech, Tennessee’s viewshed inventory is now underway in four counties in the Upper Cumberlands—Jackson, Overton, Putnam and White—home to innumerable bluffs, gorges, overlooks and waterfalls.
“Some of the most spectacular views in Tennessee are located in these four counties,” said Amy New, president and CEO of the Highlands Economic Partnership and the Cookeville-Putnam County Chamber of Commerce. “They are absolutely vital to the local economy.”
Following the pilot, the project will expand to other parts of the state until all 95 counties have been inventoried.
Nominators will go to tnvistas.org to submit up to three photos per view, along with location and other information. Nominated viewscapes may be rural or urban, natural or man-made, already protected (for instance, within a state park) or prone to development. Expansive views are preferred, though narrower/closer views may be submitted. The only “rule” is that the photographer must be on public property accessible by publicly maintained roads or trails.
The pilot review will take place Oct. 4 in the main conference room of the Upper Cumberland Development District’s offices in Cookeville. Participants will use a form to score views not only for scenic quality but for level of public engagement or concern. The top-ranked views, along with narrative descriptions and other assets, will appear as searchable points on an interactive map created for Scenic Tennessee under contract with the state’s Strategic Technology Solutions Geographic Information System (STS-GIS).
The partnership between STS-GIS and Scenic Tennessee is “unique,” said Paul Dudley, STS-GIS location intelligence analyst. While his group primarily assists other state agencies, “a dataset of Tennessee viewsheds will be a valuable asset to citizens, state agencies, tourism, developers and planning organizations across the state,” he said.
Scenic Tennessee in turn benefits from the STS-GIS arsenal of geospatial intelligence technology, Davis said. This includes the ability to build story maps, an increasingly popular product in which images, video, narration, simulations, multiple map layers and other media may be combined to tell a story or explore a theme. Davis said her group plans a “Tennessee Top 10 Views” story map once the register is complete. The map may also incorporate data layers from other agencies and programs, such as TDOT’s scenic byways program and TVA’s database of scenic overlooks.
Scenic Tennessee launches Tennessee Vistas in partnership with its parent organization, Scenic America, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on conservation issues on the national level while supporting states and communities with local concerns. Scenic America hopes to inspire other states and regions to take similar steps to identify and preserve their own scenic views, said the group’s president, Mark Falzone.
A report on the pilot project will be presented on Oct. 21 during Scenic America’s 2022 Scenic Symposium in Nashville. Scenic Tennessee co-hosts the event, which is open to the public. For more information on the symposium, visit scenic.org/resources/conferences/2022-symposium.
For now, Tennesseans can nominate viewscapes in Jackson, Overton, Putnam and White counties through Oct. 3 at tnvistas.org. The community review session will be Tuesday, Oct. 4, from 1–3 p.m. (Central) at the Upper Cumberland Development District, 1104 England Dr., Cookeville, Tennessee. For more information on the project contact Marge Davis at 615-294-2651 or margedavis@scenictennessee.org.
