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Description
Occasional Papers in Geography Publication No. 9
Places matter to people, and maps can help people and communities share why places matter. Over the past 30 years, public participation GIS (PPGIS) and other forms of human ecology mapping (HEM) have become important ways for agencies, non-governmental organizations, environmental and community advocacy groups, university researchers, and others to learn about or advocate for what matters to people about landscapes they visit, use, or love.
HEM is a method for mapping human-environment interactions and connections. This manual is intended for the planner or practitioner who is interested in using HEM to strengthen their engagement and inclusion of community members for environmental decision-making. We begin this manual with an introduction to what HEM is and why to use it. Because understanding the audience for HEM is important for collecting high-quality data, we go over how to work with data users to understand how much and what kind of data needs to be collected, and we offer advice for how to develop effective community engagement strategies. We discuss three methods for collecting HEM data: the workshop, the intercept approach, and the online interactive map application. Each method has its strength, serving different projects in different ways.
Drawing from over a decade’s experience designing HEM applications, we share some of our hard-won lessons on designing tools for public engagement and designing the map application. We then briefly discuss how to analyze HEM data, before concluding with how to report results back to the community. Finally, we have included vignettes from previous projects to illustrate our points.
Publication Date
2026
Publisher
Portland State University. Department of Geography
City
Portland, Or.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45158
Recommended Citation
Bui, Thien-Kim, McLain, Rebecca, Banis, David, and Lee Cerveny. A Guide to Human Ecology Mapping: An Approach for Understanding Human-Environment Connections Occasional Papers in Geography No. 9. https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45158