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Mapping Meaningful Places on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Landscape Values

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Abstract

Landscape values mapping has been widely employed as a form of public participation GIS (PPGIS) in natural resource planning and decision-making to capture the complex array of values, uses, and interactions between people and landscapes. A landscape values typology has been commonly employed in the mapping of social and environmental values in a variety of management settings and scales. We explore how people attribute meanings and assign values to special places on the Olympic Peninsula (Washington, USA) using both a landscape values typology and qualitative responses about residents’ place-relationships. Using geographically referenced social values data collected in community meetings (n = 169), we identify high-frequency landscape values and examine how well the landscape values are reflected in open-ended descriptions of place-relations. We also explore the various interpretations of 14 landscape values used in the study. In particular, we investigate any overlapping meanings or blurriness among landscape values and reveal potentially emergent landscape values from the qualitative data. The results provide insights on the use of landscape values mapping typologies for practitioners and researchers engaged in the mapping of social values for PPGIS.

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Acknowledgements

Funding for this project was provided by USDA-Forest Service, PNW Research Station under Joint Venture Agreement PNW 08-JV-11261985-177. We thank residents of the Olympic Peninsula who participated in our community events and shared stories, relayed memories and described their unique connections with special places throughout the region. We appreciate the support of the Olympic National Forest leadership team, who inspired this study and we hope that our results prove useful to them. We thank many people involved in aspects of this project, including Diane Besser, Melissa Poe, David Banis, Laysa Rodrigues, Leilan Greer, and Kathy LaPlante. Finally, we appreciate the thoughtful reviews of this manuscript.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. US Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, 400 N. 34th St., Suite 201, Seattle, WA, 98103, USA

    Lee Karol Cerveny

  2. Department of Fisheries & Wildlife, Oregon State University, 154 Nash Hall, Corvallis, OR, 97331-3803, USA

    Kelly Biedenweg

  3. Institute for Sustainable Solutions, Portland State University, Mail code: SUST, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR, 97207, USA

    Rebecca McLain

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  1. Lee Karol Cerveny
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Correspondence to Lee Karol Cerveny.

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Cerveny, L.K., Biedenweg, K. & McLain, R. Mapping Meaningful Places on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Landscape Values. Environmental Management 60, 643–664 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-017-0900-x

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