Abstract:Nowadays, the human-earth interrelationship is getting more and more strained. A typical example is that certain projects, which tend to cause environmentally negative impacts, have to be constructed within sensitive regions of visual landscape or nearby such as the core areas of natural reserve, historical heritage, etc. Thus visual landscape EIA, which is helpful to avoid un-reparative value loss of natural, historical, cultural and tourist resources caused by construction projects, comes to be extremely important. However, studies on visual landscape EIA in current China is still at the starting stage, and most of which focus only on theoretic summaries as well as qualitative assessments. Taking impact assessment of a construction project on the Ming Tombs landscape as a case, we discussed the quantitative method in assessing environmental impact of visual landscape with utilizing the spatial analysis functions in Geographical Information System.