A social-ecological impact assessment for public lands management: application of a conceptual and methodological framework

According to the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), federal action to manipulate habitat for species conservation requires an environmental impact statement, which should integrate natural, physical, economic, and social sciences in planning and decision making. Nonetheless, most impact assessments focus disproportionately on physical or ecological impacts rather than integrating ecological and socioeconomic components. We developed a participatory social-ecological impact assessment (SEIA) that addresses the requirements of NEPA and integrates social and ecological concepts for impact assessments. We cooperated with the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho, USA on a project designed to restore habitat for the Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus). We employed questionnaires, workshop dialogue, and participatory mapping exercises with stakeholders to identify potential environmental changes and subsequent impacts expected to result from the removal of western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis). Via questionnaires and workshop dialogue, stakeholders identified 46 environmental changes and associated positive or negative impacts to people and communities in Owyhee County, Idaho. Results of the participatory mapping exercises showed that the spatial distribution of social, economic, and ecological values throughout Owyhee County are highly associated with the two main watersheds, wilderness areas, and the historic town of Silver City. Altogether, the SEIA process revealed that perceptions of project scale varied among participants, highlighting the need for specificity about spatial and temporal scales. Overall, the SEIA generated substantial information concerning potential impacts associated with habitat treatments for Greater Sage-Grouse. The SEIA is transferable to other land management and conservation contexts because it supports holistic understanding and framing of connections between humans and ecosystems. By applying this SEIA framework, land managers and affected people have an opportunity to fulfill NEPA requirements and develop more comprehensive management plans that better reflect the linkages of social-ecological systems.

Mapping social values of ecosystem services: What is behind the map?

A growing interest in mapping the social value of ecosystem services (ES) is not yet methodologically aligned with what is actually being mapped. We critically examine aspects of the social value mapping process that might influence map outcomes and limit their practical use in decision making. We rely on an empirical case of participatory mapping, for a single ES (recreation opportunities), which involves diverse stakeholders such as planners, researchers, and community representatives. Value elicitation relied on an individual open-ended interview and a mapping exercise. Interpretation of the narratives and GIS calculations of proximity, centrality, and dispersion helped in exploring the factors driving participants’ answers. Narratives reveal diverse value types. Whereas planners highlighted utilitarian and aesthetic values, the answers from researchers revealed naturalistic values as well. In turn community representatives acknowledged symbolic values. When remitted to the map, these values were constrained to statements toward a much narrower set of features of the physical (e.g., volcanoes) and built landscape (e.g., roads). The results suggest that mapping, as an instrumental approach toward social valuation, may capture only a subset of relevant assigned values. This outcome is the interplay between participants’ characteristics, including their acquaintance with the territory and their ability with maps, and the mapping procedure itself, including the proxies used to represent the ES and the value typology chosen, the elicitation question, the cartographic features displayed on the base map, and the spatial scale.