How residents perceive and value an urban river planned to be restored? Results of an eye-tracking experiment about the Yzeron River (France)

International audience; Ecological restoration projects often rely on approaches aiming to assign values to environments. To achieve this aim, experts traditionally use sets of ecological indicators built from scientific knowledge. However, this kind of environmental assessment has recently been recognized to be too reductive, and needs to be completed by other types of indicators translating how lay-people value ecosystems. This issue is even more important in urban areas, where natural environments are known to contribute to human well-being, and thus should meet social expectations. What are, according to lay-people, the environmental characteristics making an environment valuable? To address this issue, and since environments are mainly experienced through the senses, the implementation of a sensorial assessment of environments might be really informative. This paper will present an eye – tracking experiment that enabled to collect landscape and environmental perceptions and valuations.The experiment was carried out last year along the Yzeron River, a tributary of the Rhone River, located in an urban area in the south of Lyon (France). In the course of 2014, an ecological restoration project will be conducted into the downstream half. In order to define what kind of environmental characteristics influence, according to lay-people, the value of this environment, 27 residents living near the Yzeron River were asked to walk along the waterway, wearing eye-tracking glasses. They also had to assess, at several predetermined stops, the quality of the scene, by answering a small survey.The eye-tracking and the survey data have been both qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. The results enable to identify few environmental attributes focalizing the visual attention when assessing the value of landscape, and to determine in what extent these attributes are influencing the environmental perceived value.