Place Assessment: How People Define Ecosystems. Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem211 Management Project: Scientific Assessment

摘要

This paper focuses on mapping places and their meanings, and trying to capture211u001ethe richness and humanity of a sense of place. Identify geographic areas of 211u001eimportance to communities intrinsically results in the omission of both the 211u001eglobal and the individual importance of those areas. Despite such difficulties, 211u001ethis paper provides a conceptual framework for operationalizing place assessment. 211u001eIt describes the significance of place concepts to humans, past and present. It 211u001esuggests several important place elements for consideration in ecosystem 211u001eassessments, analyses, and planning projects. And it shows that community-defined 211u001eplaces are not only possible but practical in ecological assessments. This paper 211u001ealso demonstrates the existence and identification of meaningful place themes. At 211u001elarge scales, place themes rely on traditional land use terminology as a way of 211u001eassessing the interrelations among the general images of adjoining geographic 211u001eareas. The authors speculate that such interrelations provide a means for 211u001edecisionmakers to better understand the relative importance of the lands and 211u001eresources they manage.