Values Mapping and Counter-Mapping in Contested Landscapes: an Olympic Peninsula (USA) Case Study

Indigenous peoples, local communities, and other groups can use counter-mapping to make land claims, identify areas of desired access, or convey cultural values that diverge from the dominant paradigm. While sometimes created independently, counter-maps also can be formulated during public participation mapping events sponsored by natural resource planning agencies. Public participation mapping elicits values, uses, and meanings of landscapes from diverse stakeholders, yet individuals and advocacy groups can use the mapping process as an opportunity to make visible strongly held values and viewpoints. We present three cases from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State to illustrate how stakeholders intentionally used landscape-values mapping workshops to amplify their perspectives in attempts to further political outcomes. We combine geospatial analysis with qualitative data to explore ways that landscape-values mapping were used as a political tool and how social scientists engaged in similar efforts can defend the scientific integrity of results

Developing Human Wellbeing Indicators in the Hood Canal Watershed

Planning for and monitoring human wellbeing as a component of ecosystem recovery is a growing trend in coastal zone management. Within the Puget Sound specifically, organizations at the watershed and basin scale have been developing recovery action plans with placeholders for human wellbeing or quality of life indicators. While the actual incorporation of human wellbeing into policy has been limited, there is significant interest to receive guidance for developing indicators and begin addressing human wellbeing in practice. This article describes the results of a pilot process to develop scientifically and practically relevant human wellbeing indicators for the Hood Canal watershed of the Puget Sound. We gathered data on why residents and visitors value the Hood Canal from prior surveys, workshops, and nineteen open-ended interviews with diverse residents from the region. We coded these values into potential indicators of human wellbeing for seven domains: Psychological, Spiritual, Cultural, Social, Physical, Economic, and Governance. Three facilitated workshops with expert-stakeholders and an online survey with social scientists helped refine and rate indicators for recommendation to the regional watershed recovery coordinating council. We present the final indicators, detail the methods for getting to them, and discuss how they will be applied to enhance watershed recovery in the Hood Canal and larger Puget Sound Basin

Distrust within protected area and natural resource management: A systematic review protocol

Trust is a key variable for successful natural resource management and is commonly the focus of conceptual and methodological development. Distrust, on the other hand, is frequently cited as an obstacle to management, but appears to be rarely defined, conceptually underdeveloped, and inconsistently examined. This systematic review protocol (OSF preregistration https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GKUAW) was developed to answer two primary questions in relation to protected area and natural resource management: 1) How is distrust conceptualized, and 2) What methods are used to gather evidence of distrust? The aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of how distrust is theoretically developed and what questions are used to uncover distrust. Also, it will summarize findings on what leads to and results from distrust. Four academic and eight gray literature databases will be searched using Boolean keyword searches. Articles eligible for inclusion are those that present original research, gather and present evidence of distrust, and focus on protected areas and/or natural resource management. The review will result in a narrative synthesis that summarizes approaches to distrust within protected area and natural resource management

An Ecosystem Framework for use in Recovery and Management of the Puget Sound Ecosystem: Linking Assessments of Ecosystem Condition to Threats and Management Strategies

The ongoing influx of people to the Puget Sound basin has placed pressure on the ecosystem and contributed to a decline in ecosystem health. The Puget Sound Partnership (Partnership), formed in July 2007, is leading an effort to restore the health of Puget Sound. The Partnership is taking an ecosystem-based approach to management that will, over time, address policy questions associated with multiple interacting ecosystem goals. As a foundation of this approach, indicators of ecosystem condition are used to describe a healthy Puget Sound, to evaluate progress towards meeting the recovery goals, to evaluate and adapt management strategies, and as the basis for reporting back to the public. A portfolio of high-level ecological and human health indicators, “vital signs,” was developed and adopted in 2011. Since then, the indicators have received external review by the WA State Academy of Sciences, scientists, planners, decision-makers, and other stakeholders. In response, the Partnership is evolving its portfolio of indicators in order to provide a broader set of indicators to track progress toward threat reductions and ecosystem recovery. To guide the indicator evolution process, we developed an overall organizing ecosystem framework that is an amalgamation of three frameworks: (1) a generalized “causal chain/network framework” that is used to link drivers and pressures of ecosystem health with (2) a framework for assessment of the condition of Puget Sound’s biophysical system, and (3) a framework for the condition of human well-being (HWB). Assessing a complete array of condition and driver/pressure indicators can aid the analysis of the causal mechanisms underlying compromised ecosystem condition. Moreover, in this framework, HWB is recognized as an outcome of biophysical condition as well as a driver of biophysical condition, and that its many components are differentially affected by and can affect conservation outcomes. This paper will present examples of how the Partnership, working with the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program, is using this ecosystem framework to identify key ecosystem attributes and associated indicators for major ecosystem components. These biophysical condition indicators, along with indicators of key pressures on the system and indicators of HWB, can be used adaptively to track the recovery of Puget Sound

Is there no “I” in team? Potential bias in key informant interviews when asking individuals to represent a collective perspective

This paper sought to understand the extent to which, and how individuals use personal or collective language when asked to articulate sense of place from a collective perspective. Understanding a collective sense of place could illuminate place-based connections in natural resource industries, where it is as groups or as institutions that organizations interact with the environment rather than as individuals. While there are well known methods for collecting information about sense of place at the individual level, there is a gap in understanding the best method to collect information at a collective level. We examined the use of key-informant interviews as a method to understand collective sense of place. In Bocas del Toro, Panama, ecotourism and environmentally based organizations are becoming more prolific due to abundant natural resources, making it an interesting case study for understanding sense of place from an organizational perspective. The use of personal and collective language is examined though in-depth semi-structured interviews from 15 environmentally-oriented organizations with a total of 17 interviews. This study specifically examined whether and how key informants, when prompted to speak for their organization, spoke collectively, reflecting a collective perspective versus their own. Methods included both quantitative analysis of personal versus collective language use frequency, and qualitative examinations of how individuals used personal versus collective language. Our results indicated no difference in the frequency with which individuals use personal versus collective language. We found that how individuals situated their perspectives into an organization reflects a complex personal and collective point of view reflecting five themes of personal versus collective language use: 1) sole personal perspective, 2) sole collective perspective, 3) distinction between collective and personal perspective; 4) organization perspective with insertion of “I think”; and 5) personal and collective perspective about organization and greater community. Our research identifies a previously undiscussed potential bias of key informant interviews. These findings have implications for how researchers approach collecting information beyond the individual level

A framework for evaluating forest conservation implications of community-based capacity building: Experiences from the northern Bolivian amazon

Capacity-building projects in forest-based communities are implemented by governments, cooperatives, and non-government organisations to encourage sustainable management of community forests. While such projects are regularly evaluated on a case-by-case basis, they are rarely subjected to a landscape-level examination to explore conservation implications. To understand how environmental capacity-building projects address regional conservation goals, an interdisciplinary framework was developed to highlight the thematic focus, the geographic distribution, and the degree of community participation in environmental capacity-building projects. We demonstrate how the framework can be used by characterising projects in campesino communities in the Amazonian department of Pando, Bolivia, that were active during 2006-2008. While projects were too recent to affect forest cover, we describe how the framework elucidates three project themes (timber, Brazil nut, and agroforestry management); that project distribution was largely related to land tenure security, proximity to town, historical relationships, and motorised access; and that capacity-building strategies varied in participation, depending on thematic content and federal requirements for specific resources. We then discuss how the framework can be used to analyse forest cover implications over many years. Understanding the combination of thematic focus, geographic distribution, and degree of participation in project strategies offers a foundation for understanding how capacity-building initiatives can influence forest landscapes

Human Wellbeing Discussion

This 15 minute block is reserved to engage in a constructive discussion about measuring and implementing metrics of human wellbeing in Salish Sea management. We will focus on bridging the diverse talks and discussing the application across countries, regions, and jurisdictions

Developing Human Wellbeing Indicators for the Puget Sound Partnership

The consequences of environmental change span the realm of human experience, making it difficult for natural resource managers to identify and evaluate common impacts and priority benefits to humans. Simple frameworks that generalize the best metrics of human wellbeing related to the natural environment have rarely been empirically tested for their representativeness across diverse social-ecological systems. This study tested the hypothesis that metrics of human wellbeing related to environmental change are context specific by identifying priority human wellbeing indicators in distinct social-ecological systems. Working in three regions, the research team interviewed 61 experts and held 8 stakeholder workshops to identify and prioritize locally-relevant indicators. Results from the three regions were compared to understand the degree of geographic and demographic variability in indicator priorities, providing an initial test to the hypothesis. We found broadly similar domains and attributes of human wellbeing across the different social-ecological systems, yet measurable indicators were specific to the social-ecological contexts. Despite this, the congruence of overarching domains suggests that a simple high-level framework of human wellbeing can guide a holistic assessment of the human impacts of global environmental change across diverse social-ecological systems

Values Mapping with Latino Forest Users: Contributing to the Dialogue on Multiple Land Use Conflict Management

Values mapping that represents how humans associate with natural environments is useful for several purposes, including recognizing and addressing different perceptions of natural resource ownership and management priorities, documenting traditional ecological knowledge, and spatially identifying the public\u27s perception of economic and non-economic services provided by natural resources (McLain et al. 2013). The majority of this work has been conducted in developing countries and with disenfranchised communities, where participatory mapping associated with natural resource management is more widely practiced. As access to GIS technology has expanded, however, several projects have tested the benefits of values mapping for natural resource management decisions in industrialized countries (e.g., Brown 2005; Klain and Chan 2012). This article discusses one such effort: the use of spatial values mapping to incorporate the concerns of Latino forest users into federal and state policies on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State