Marion County Heritage Map Project

With the soft opening of Pasaquan, Marion County’s visionary art environment, in summer 2016, and its grand opening by Columbus State University in fall 2016, the Marion County Chamber of Commerce requested that the Columbus Community Geography Center partner to develop a heritage tour map of the county for welcome centers across the state. This small rural county of 8,700 residences, 60% white, 30% black and 7.5% Hispanic. One fifth of the population live below the poverty level. It recently lost several hundred jobs with the closure of the local chicken processing plant. Plans to launch a tourism program is understood to be of great importance to the community. CSU’s Dr. Amanda Rees, Professor of Geography, and Professor Chuck Lawson, Department of Art, College of the Arts joined forces to create a heritage tour map of Buena Vista and Marion County. Geography students ran a community workshop to identify twenty-one county and city heritage sites for inclusion. They researched and wrote short descriptions for the map and extended histories for an accompanying web page to be accessed from the map with a QR code. Students also produced an accurate map of each site and the major roads and other primary physical features of the county and city. Graphic design students then received the map text and GIS maps of the county and the city. Students designed three “roughs” of the map for external review. The first review included Marion County leaders, state tourism representatives, and several faculty in art, GIS and geography. The roughs were then refined and presented again to a group of reviewers. This project proved to be a good fit for CSU’s QEP “Real World Problems Solving” project in its testing phase in spring 2016. This interdisciplinary “service learning” project offered high impact educational practices, fieldwork, student-led heritage workshop in Marion County, critical feedback from community members on writing, and design. This interdisciplinary project was aligned with CSU’s mission to support alternative pedagogical approaches to address the needs of millennial learners

Community attitudes toward forest conservation programs through collaborative protected area management in Bangladesh

The formulation of conservation policies with options for creating protected areas is significantly influenced by the social factors of the surrounding communities. Therefore, indigenous knowledge, attitudes and perceptions of the local communities need to be explored during the planning and implementation stages of conservation projects. A government-initiated experiment in co-management was conducted in the Rema-Kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary, Bangladesh. This paper analyzes the attitudes toward conservation by members of local communities living in and around the wildlife sanctuary. Training incentives on alternative income-generating (AIG) activities and allotment of agricultural lands were distributed among the Forest User Groups. It is of interest to policy makers and resource managers whether this technique leads to improved attitudes on the part of local people. Although there were different attitudes toward protected areas and conservation, overall, a favorable attitude of the respondents was observed. The opinions of respondents also varied based on factors such as village position, village dependency level on forest resources, ethnicity and gender. Increase in annual income resulting from the augmented skills by trainings on AIG activities and getting agricultural lands leased from the Forest Department contributed significantly to the variation in respondents' conservation attitudes. It is suggested that eliminating inequity and inequality in incentive distribution, discovering and launching training on more need-based livelihood activities, and liberalizing the restriction of resource extraction from the protected area by fixing the harvesting limit would encourage the community to be more cordially and actively involved in the conservation efforts of the sanctuary