Objective In the context of rapid globalization and urbanization, the decline of landscape has continued to capture attention worldwide while landscapes are losing their diversity, continuity and locality characters. How to protect, plan and manage landscape in a systematic way has become a constant issue. Landscape character has been defined as “a distinct, recognizable and consistent pattern of landscape elements that makes one landscape different from another, rather than better or worse”. As an effective tool for understanding the connotation of landscape, managing landscape change, and identifying landscape value, landscape character assessment (LCA) has been researched and carried out worldwide. Featuring the combination of subjectivity and objectivity, landscape characterization is one of the fundamental tasks in carrying out territorial landscape protection, planning and management. Most of the existing LCA researches focus on the identification stage for it is a prerequisite for assessment. More importantly, the connotations of LCA and the “Europe Landscape Convention” (ELC) pose challenges for synthesizing the relationship between qualitativeness and quantitativeness, and between subjectivity and objectivity in identification. This research aims to systematically sort out the relationship between qualitativeness and quantitativeness, and between subjectivity and objectivity in multi-scale identification, and to provide reference for whole area identification of landscape characters in China in the context of territorial spatial planning.

Methods Based on literature induction and deduction, this research derives from the definition of landscape character in Europe five core questions with respect to the identification of landscape character: 1) Who identifies landscape character; 2) what are the elements included in landscape character; 3) how to perceive landscape character; 4) how to identify landscape character; and 5) how to express landscape character. On this basis, the research analyzes relevant cases of landscape character identification by induction and deduction, and takes scale variation as the carrier integrating subjective and objective attributes of landscape character and subjective judgments in landscape character identification.

Results This research summarizes the relationship between ELC and LCA. The concept of landscape character has an impact on the definition of ELC. As the first international treaty dedicated to landscape, ELC explicitly used the word “character” in its definition of “landscape”, marking the initial official introduction of “character” in European governmental laws and regulations. Meanwhile, ELC has contributed to the comprehensive development of landscape character research. ELC is a key for cross-border and cross-disciplinary communication on landscape issues among EU member states at the legal and regulatory levels, and serves as the basis for the continuous development of European landscape character assessment. In addition, this research also systematically analyzes five topics related to the definition and identification of landscape character, including participant identification, element composition, cognition mode, identification method, and graphic form. Furthermore, the research analyzes the hierarchical features of multi-scale landscape character identification, including both scale size and downscaling. The downscaling process is also the process of interchanging landscape character types and landscape character areas, but it does not only refer to the process of shifting from abstractness to concreteness and from coarser resolution to more detailed resolution. The process of downscaling is accompanied by a change of concerns such as elements, participants, and methods adopted. From the downscaling perspective, different concerns of the above five topics can be synthesized. As a result, this research summarizes the patterns of changes in five topics during the transition from macro to micro scales: the shift in identification participants from experts to the general public; the shift of cognition modes from indirect cognition to direct cognition; the shift in element composition from natural factors to cultural factors; the shift in identification methods from digital division to human interpretation; and the shift of graphic forms from scientific graphic to science popularization graphic. The key difficulties and priorities of each topic are also explained.Drawing on the European Landscape Character Assessment Initiative (ELCAI), this research clarifies the basic framework of landscape characterization in a formulaic language to serve multi-scale landscape characterization tasks in a more holistic and clear way. The idea of multi-scale landscape identification can be succinctly expressed by the following equation: Characterization = f (P_(t), F_(t), C_(t), M_(t), G_(t)). The equation has six independent variables of P, F, C, M, G, and t, respectively indicating identification participant, factor category, cognition mode, identification method, graphic mode, and time depth.

Conclusion As to the relationship between man and nature, Chinese philosophy has been emphasizing the “unity of man and nature”. In the current Anthropocene stage, the Eastern and Western views of landscape concept have moved from conceptual division to integration, and this unification of landscape epistemology is the basis for the research of landscape character theory in China. Nowadays, the significance of effective protection and management of regional traditional landscape has been widely recognized worldwide, and the evolution of landscape degradation brought about by globalization and rapid urbanization has become a common challenge faced by all countries. In addition to innovative ideas for the protection, planning and management of territorial landscape, ELC and LCA have also brought about the challenge of systematically identifying and assessing landscape. Taking scale as the carrier for shifting, this research systematically analyzes the objectivity and subjectivity of landscape character identification, with a view to contributing to the protection and management of the diversity, continuity, and locality characters of territorial landscape in the context of China’s territorial spatial planning.