United StatesDepartment ofAgriculture

Forest ServicePacific NorthwestResearch Station

United StatesDepartment of theInterior

Bureau of LandManagement

General TechnicalReportPNW-GTR-462September 1999

Place Assessment: How PeopleDefine Ecosystems

Steven J. Galliano and Gary M. Loeffler

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AuthorsSTEVEN J. GALLIANO and GARY M. LOEFFLER are landscape architects, Interior Columbia BasinEcosystem Management Project, 112 E. Poplar Street, Walla Walla, WA 99362.

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Place Assessment: How People DefineEcosystems

Steven J. Galliano and Gary M. Loeffler

Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem ManagementProject: Scientific Assessment

Thomas M. Quigley, Editor

U.S. Department of AgricultureForest ServicePacific Northwest Research StationPortland, OregonGeneral Technical Report PNW-GTR-462September 1999

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PrefaceThe Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project was initiated by the Forest Service andthe Bureau of Land Management to respond to several critical issues including, but not limited to, for-est and rangeland health, anadromous fish concerns, terrestrial species viability concerns, and the re-cent decline in traditional commodity flows. The charter given to the project was to develop a scien-tifically sound, ecosystem-based strategy for managing the lands of the interior Columbia River basinadministered by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. The Science Integration Teamwas organized to develop a framework for ecosystem management, an assessment of the socioeconomicand biophysical systems in the basin, and an evaluation of alternative management strategies. Thispaper is one in a series of papers developed as background material for the framework, assessment, orevaluation of alternatives. It provides more detail than was possible to disclose directly in the primarydocuments.

The Science Integration Team, although organized functionally, worked hard at integrating the ap-proaches, analyses, and conclusions. It is the collective effort of team members that provides depthand understanding to the work of the project. The Science Integration Team leadership included deputyteam leaders Russel Graham and Sylvia Arbelbide; landscape ecology—Wendel Hann, Paul Hessburg,and Mark Jensen; aquatic—Jim Sedell, Kris Lee, Danny Lee, Jack Williams, Lynn Decker; economic—Richard Haynes, Amy Horne, and Nick Reyna; social science—Jim Burchfield, Steve McCool, JonBumstead, and Stewart Allen; terrestrial—Bruce Marcot, Kurt Nelson, John Lehmkuhl, RichardHolthausen, Randy Hickenbottom, Marty Raphael, and Michael Wisdom; spatial analysis—BeckyGravenmier, John Steffenson, and Andy Wilson.

Thomas M. QuigleyEditor

United StatesDepartment ofAgriculture

Forest Service

United StatesDepartment ofthe Interior

Bureau of LandManagement

Interior Columbia BasinEcosystem ManagementProject

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AbstractGalliano, Steven J.; Loeffler, Gary M. 1999. Place assessment: how people define ecosystems. Gen.

Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-462. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, PacificNorthwest Research Station. 31p. (Quigley, Thomas M., ed.; Interior Columbia Basin EcosystemManagement Project: scientific assessment).

Understanding the concepts of place in ecosystem management may allow land managers to moreactively inventory and understand the meanings that people attach to the lands and resources under thecare of the land manager. Because place assessment has not been used operationally in past large-scaleevaluations and analyses, it was necessary in the assessment of the interior Columbia basin (hereafterreferred to as the basin) to apply theories based on available literature. These theories were used withintwo large test areas inside the assessment area boundaries. From the test area experiences, it was ap-parent that the most appropriate scale for place assessment was at the community level. Ecologicalsubsections, however, can serve as acceptable surrogates for place identification when time constraintsdo not permit adequate place inventories at the community level. Subsections provide a method forestablishing the identity and themes of relatively large places. The identities and themes of these largeplaces are useful in public land and resource planning for encouraging public participation early in theplanning process, for measuring the importance of a place relative to its neighboring places, and forpredicting possible environmental changes resulting from management alternatives. Place assessment inthe basin demonstrated the importance of place to humanity, illustrated how inventory concepts of placecan be operationalized for ecosystem assessments, and suggested how place assessments may be used insubsequent levels of analysis, planning, and decisionmaking.

Keywords: Place assessment, place themes, place concepts.

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Contents1 Introduction to Place

1 Place Definitions

1 Place in Ecosystem Management

1 Places in the Interior Columbia Basin

2 Goals and Objectives

2 Organization

2 Place Concepts

2 Elements of Place

3 The Importance of Place

8 Place Roles in Natural Resource Planning

14 Place Assessment Methods

15 Community Perception of Place Meanings in the Test Areas

19 Ecological Subsections as Places

23 Conclusions

26 Research Limitations

27 Recommendations and Future Research Needs

27 Closing Thoughts

28 Acknowledgments

29 References

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Executive SummaryBecause people are part of ecosystems, human dimensions of ecosystems must be integrated into ourland management practices. The values and meanings of the places in the interior Columbia basin (here-after referred to as the basin) are a medium permitting such integration. A sense of place serves as asignificant factor for reflecting the human dimensions of ecosystems and also functions as a link be-tween social experiences and geographic areas. Sense of place concerns are really part of a larger setof concerns that might be called the science of place.

Ecosystem management is one response to the limitations of the so-called modern science of ecology,which seeks rational, comprehensive, but often placeless understanding of the world abstracted andremoved from specific contexts. In keeping with ecosystem management as a spatial and historicalscience, human dimensions need to be similarly conceptualized. This paper focuses on mapping placesand their meanings, and trying to capture the richness and humanity of a sense of place.

Human ecosystems are difficult to map. As soon as a new mapping approach is generated, its defi-ciencies are easily pointed out. Identifying geographic areas of importance to communities intrinsicallyresults in the omission of both the global and the individual importance of those areas. Despite suchdifficulties, this paper provides a conceptual framework for operationalizing place assessment. It de-scribes the significance of place concepts to humans, past and present. It suggests several importantplace elements for consideration in ecosystem assessments, analyses, and planning projects. And itshows that community-defined places are not only possible but practical in ecological assessments.

This paper also demonstrates the existence and identification of meaningful place themes. At largescales, place themes rely on traditional land use terminology as a way of assessing the interrelationsamong the general images of adjoining geographic areas. We speculate that such interrelations providea means for decisionmakers to better understand the relative importance of the lands and resources theymanage.

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Introduction to PlaceYour province is not the wilderness,where the individual makes contact withthe universe, but the farm, the neighbor-hood, the community, the town, thememory of the past, and the hope of thefuture—everything that is subsumed foryou under the word “place” (Stegner1992).

Place DefinitionsContained within the ecosystem managementphilosophy is the notion that an ecosystem is rec-ognized by humans as a place. Simply stated, aplace is a geographic area that has meaning topeople. It is through the mental construct of placethat people relate to and understand a geographicarea.

Sense of place is a holistic concept that focuseson the subjective and often shared experienceor attachment to the landscape emotionally orsymbolically. Sense of place is a subjective expe-rience or view of place description of the mean-ings, images, and attachments people give tospecific locations. Sense of place refers to theperception people have of a physical area withwhich they interact, whether for a few minutes ora lifetime, that gives that area special meaning tothem, their community,1 or their culture.

Through association and interaction with geo-graphic areas, whether physically, spiritually, orthrough various media, people form long-termattachments with places. Research shows thatplace attachment is customarily passed downthrough generations, becoming part of people’sheritage in a personal way. Thus, place assess-ment is a way to inventory the locations, names,and broad meanings of the attachments peopleshare for geographic areas within the basin. Theimages people hold for larger scale places canbe described with phrases that indicate degreesof naturalness or development. These phrases,called place themes, are similar to the termssometimes used in land use planning professions.

Why would natural resource managers be inter-ested in the identification and meanings ofplaces? Assessing place meanings addresses howhumans identify, describe, and interact with theenvironment. Understanding the concepts ofplace in ecosystem management allows managersto more actively inventory and understand themeanings people attach to the lands and resourcesthey manage. Place assessment may not eliminateclashes over resources and land uses, but it canhelp to inform natural resource managers of whycertain conflicts occur and how to deal with themmost effectively.

Place in Ecosystem ManagementEcosystem management offers several new stra-tegies that allow land and resource managers tobe more responsive to social concerns. In fact,one of the most significant characteristics of eco-system management is its ability to validate hu-man emotional and symbolic meanings of publiclands and their natural resources. Rather thanconcentrating on single-value commodities, eco-system management promotes a holistic manage-ment process that sustains both natural and socialsystems in which geographic specificity (place) isconsidered a key component (Williams 1995).

Successful implementation of the ecosystem man-agement philosophy is dependent on the ability ofdecisionmakers and resource managers to analyzeand understand local social concerns at both in-dividual and community levels. The real value ofusing place concepts in ecosystem management isthat managers can actively inventory and under-stand the meanings that people attach to the landsand resources they manage. The identity andmeanings of place at both individual and commu-nity levels are, therefore, essential to the successof future management plans.

Places in the Interior ColumbiaBasinThe values and meanings of the places in thebasin serve as both significant factors reflectingthe human dimensions of ecosystems and as linksbetween social experiences and geographic areas.Haynes and others (1995) acknowledge the vital

1 For the purpose of this paper, “community” refers topeople with shared interests, concerns, norms, or values,usually centered around where they live but which mayencompass shared values regardless of residence.

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roles that people and cultural values play in eco-system management. Specifically, they stress astrong alliance between ecosystem managementand the social realities of place as one of its fiveprimary objectives; “manage for the human senseof place.”

Goals and ObjectivesPlace assessment is a way to inventory the lo-cations, names, and meanings of the attach-ments people share for geographic areas. It de-monstrates the importance of place to people,illustrates how the concepts of place can beoperationalized for ecosystem assessments, andmakes suggestions for using place assessment insubsequent levels of analysis, planning, anddecisionmaking. Place assessment is an introduc-tory level discussion intended to (1) provide landand resource managers with a better understand-ing of the importance of geographic places withinthe basin, (2) show how the symbolic meaningsand themes of important places can be used inresource decisionmaking, and (3) illustrate howplaces can be used to express potential changesthat may occur through the implementation ofmanagement alternatives.

OrganizationThis paper first helps the reader to understand thebasic concepts of place, the historical importanceof place attachment in the basin, and the value ofunderstanding place meanings to ecosystem man-agers. Next, it explains practical methods for in-ventorying place meanings at both the communityand ecological subsection scales. Place themesand the possible interrelations among placethemes are then discussed, followed by conclu-sions obtained from this work. Finally, recom-mendations are made for future work in assessingplace meanings.

Place Concepts“A sense of place restores one’s relationship tothe land and the community, and therefore tooneself” (Simonson 1989).

Elements of PlaceSense of place is a combination of elements that,according to cultural geographer Ryden (1993),includes four essential qualities: personal memo-ry, community history, physical landscape appear-ance, and emotional attachment. Although peopletend to be unaware of their presence, these fourqualities are often blended into life’s experiencesthrough various media such as TV, movies, maps,art, and photography, as well as through folklore,traditions, experiences, and knowledge of pastevents that have given special meanings to aplace.

People who have never visited a specific placemay know it by name and value it. They also maymaintain an image of that place based on whatthey have seen or heard. Various media may con-struct a sense of place that is different from whatpeople who actually visit a place construct. Weare all aware of the power of television, photog-raphy, and art in revealing the physical appear-ance of a place. The media might even be able tocapture the mood and meaning of a place at agiven time. Such portrayals, however, also mayprovide a misleading, stereotypical view of aplace that may only be rectified by an actual visitto that place. Visiting a place that we have heardabout often forms a completely different impres-sion than the one we had originally formed aboutthat place. Although the place may look the sameas that presented by the media, the “feeling” weexpect may never materialize. Thus a sense ofplace need not be authentic but is still real to thepeople who act on it.

The 1950s Disney movie “Davy Crockett” de-picted the Alamo in the 1800s as a quaint adobestructure nestled into rolling grass-covered Texashills, surrounded by clumps of oaks. In this awardwinning film, the Alamo’s historic significance,along with its picturesque setting, created animage of a place where one could go to meditatewith a sense of emotional attachment. On visit-ing the Alamo, however, one will find that it islocated directly across a busy San Antonio boule-vard from a dilapidated Woolworth department

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store, surrounded by urban walls, concrete side-walks, and parked cars. Inside the Alamo aredisplay racks filled with rubber tomahawks andother trinkets. The image of the Alamo thatDisney created was actually very different fromthe place visitors may experience in San Antoniotoday.

A similar example, but with perhaps an oppositeeffect, is Yellowstone National Park following thecatastrophic wildfires of 1988.

For the general public, the media frequentlycreated an image of vast destruction and chaos inYellowstone following the conflagration. Anactual visit to the park, however, may reveal arebirth of natural resources. Previous stands ofdense vegetation are now broken by grassy mea-dows offering exceptional views of native floraand fauna that did not exist before the fire.

This example indicates that by visiting a place,the human experience can sometimes exceed theexpectations created by the media. Thus, theinterpretation of a place through direct, personalexperience exposes identities, meanings, andimages that may not have been expected.

Similarly, places to which people travel or re-locate, and to which businesses transfer, arechosen on the basis of expected benefits (Deller1995, Gottlieb 1994, Leicht and Jenkins 1994,Yuan and Christensen 1994). This means thatpeople can have an attachment to a place, basedon expectations, even before they have personallyexperienced that place. Although people travel orrelocate to a place based on expected benefits,their actual evaluation and recommendations ofits settings are based on direct experiences.

The Importance of Place“Attitudes toward wilderness and the countryside,insofar as they are verbalized and known, aresophisticated responses to environment that havetheir origins in the city. They presuppose theexistence and recognition of environmental typesand a degree of freedom to choose among them”(Tuan 1974).

Historical overview—Humans have aspired tocommunicate about places that are important tothem throughout recorded history. Maps of an-cient Egyptian cities, preserved on clay tablets forthousands of years, show some of the earliest ex-pressions of geographic places. Although moresymbolic than realistic, the earliest maps showedillustrations of spirits associated with geographicareas as an indication of how the people of thattime felt about some places. Images of dragonsand demons often gave warning to potentialtravelers that those areas held some mysteriousand perhaps dangerous qualities, often combiningthree-dimensional images with significant land-forms. To those ancient societies, maps portrayedan experiential understanding of the Earth’ssurface (Ryden 1993).

Our early American predecessors also expressedmap features and boundaries in experientialterms. Early villagers distrusted the wildernessthat lay just beyond their tilled fields and oftenshowed their paranoia by illustrating the beastsand other dangers that lay beyond the villages ontheir maps and legends. Our biological and socialneeds to know the locations of resources, travelroutes, suitable residential and meeting places,and the nature of lands and people beyond ourown homelands compel us to learn and pass onour knowledge and experiences. Thus, since thebeginning of written communication, maps haveremained a prominent expression of places, theirnames and their meanings. Human resource ex-tractive interactions not only gave these areascharacter and image but reflected the meaningspeople assigned to the landscape.

In a similar manner, the local names we assignplaces today can incorporate a local identity thathelps provide insight into the ways in which peo-ple experience and interpret the geographic areasthey have shaped: Pine Valley, Liberty MiningDistrict, and Dusty are just a few. Compared tothe ornately illustrated maps of bygone centuries,however, modern cartography is narrow andlimited. Contemporary maps say nothing aboutthe character or image of a place. Although their

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meanings do not appear on today’s automobileclub maps, the dry land wheat fields of thePalouse, the gold mines of the upper KittitasValley, and the monoculture stands of pine result-ing from past logging practices in central Oregonare expressions left on the landscapes of the basinby past generations. Human interactions withthese places, mainly through resource extraction,gave these areas both character and image.

Just as TV, movies, maps, art, and photographymay reveal the meanings of a place, human alter-ations on a geographic area may convey messagesthat speak of the feeling and significance of thatplace (Ryden 1993). From a historic perspective,it is common to find places where human cultureshave altered landscapes in an effort to shape themaccording to their own ideological visions and, inturn, for these same cultures to be shaped by theirenvironments.

The stringing of barbed wire fences along theproperty boundaries of early settlers in the 1800sforced geometric patterns and vegetative changesthat exist today. These fence lines not only oncemade strong statements concerning a family’sdegree of wealth in real estate or livestock butalso formed circulation patterns, tract boundaries,and biological alterations that have resulted intoday’s arrangement of travel ways, land uses,zoning ordinances, and other societal effects.

Native inhabitants of the basin are descendants ofover 40 separate national groupings, with severaldifferent languages as different to each other asChinese is to English. The heritage of these peo-ple is long, spanning more than 600 generations.The relations these people have to the landswithin the basin are extensive and textured as onemight expect from such a diverse, complex, andlengthy presence. Though changed and largelyassimilated into the greater American society,these American Indian peoples inherit a culturalgeography that is distinct and rarely shared withtheir non-Indian neighbors. Thus, the native per-spective of place as an element of cultural geo-graphy needs to be considered along with otheridentifications of places and their meaningswithin the assessment process.

The Native American peoples of the basin gen-erally differ by cultural area and ethno-historicgroupings of Indian nations, reservation tribalgroups, and family teachings (Hunn 1996). Theircultural teachings, values, traditional stories, andplaces have been largely retained through nativelanguages; now often transferred to the youngergenerations in the borrowed language of English.In native ideology, people did not presume to in-vent names of places; rather they occupied theland allowing its own characteristics to remaindominant. The characteristics of various placesoften carried identities that were passed fromgeneration to generation, often imbued withsacred significance. These identities may refer-ence mythological stories, subsistence activities,physiographic-plant-animal features, or spiritualevents and values.

The significance of place to these people hasbeen described as follows:

The land is alive for traditional Indianpeople. Its life is seen in plants, animals,waters, soils, rocks, hills, mountains,places, spirit presence, sky, wind, cloudsand the unseen measures of good andbad. The land and its places are morethan a background for human activitiesand, together with its life forms, may beunderstood to communicate earthly factsas well as future conditions and humanevents. People’s experiences may beviewed in the context of their uniquecultural and symbolic interpretations andattributions of sacredness to places andlandscapes even while involved in dailyactivities with modern dress and equip-ment. Such experiences may be as un-spoken as the perception that one shouldnot eat near cemeteries (a type of place),as subtle as that the sunrise is greetedwith greater significance than the sunset,as specific as that a root field/berry patch(another type of place) may not includethe full extent of its food plants’ habitat,as disconcerting as witnessing an un-

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usual animal’s behavior, or as profoundas learning a “teaching and song” whilecamped on a known powerful mountain.2

An example of place attachment for some tribalmembers in the project area can be found atCelilo Falls (fig. 1).

Celilo Falls was one of the inland Northwest’spremier fisheries and was historically controlledby Indian fishing interests. These once powerfulfalls were inundated by the completion of TheDalles Dam in spring 1957 and are now silent,slow waters. Yet, as a place, Celilo remainsentwined in the lives of those families belonging

to the mid-Columbia River. Celilo’s spiritualsignificance, past economic promise as a majorfishery, and persisting community preserves thisas a meaningful place even to the youths.

A village of about 30 families under the YakamaNation’s jurisdiction is all that is now evident atCelilo. Yet, as a place, Celilo may be perceived asit extends beyond the village site to the area ofthe former falls (and its fishing-crossing areas),a river stretch above and below, the communitycemetery, the beach, and nearby food and enter-tainment establishments. The social and religiouslife values continue as evidenced by the commu-nity’s annual observance to the first foods of theseason, competition dances, longhouse Sundayservices, and associated activities.

Figure 1—Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, 1947. (Illustration courtesy of Traci Mc.Merritt [1995])

2 Personal communication. 1995. Mary Keith, archeologist,Umatilla National Forest, 2517 S.W. Hailey Ave., Pendleton,OR 97801.

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Attachment to this place is both sentimental and agenuine part of “The River” cultural perspective.People at Celilo bonded to other area river andreservation communities through strong kinshipties in a continuum of generations across time. Itsnative place name has origins in a legendary“Coyote” story, which humorously explains theorigins of the falls, a prominent rock feature onthe north side of the river (now destroyed), andhow up-river people were assured supplies ofsalmon.

Celilo is home to many “River Indians” (whetherthey reside there or not), as a place where livingand making a living was entwined in family rela-tions, regional kinship and economic networks,and daily religious life perceptions and practices.When Celilo Falls was first inundated, someelders refused to look upon it because of the painit brought them; some wept; and others, even tothis day, quietly mourn the loss of its formerbeing.

Celilo serves as an anchor and reference forsignificant individual and the mid-ColumbiaRiver community life events, including the“good, sad, and light of life. Its culturalsignificance is complete” (see footnote 2).

The continuing process of cultural placedestruction has social, religious, andspiritual costs as well as economic im-pact. The productive fishery of Celilo, sowell known in the history books, servedas a regional trade center and gatheringplace, a central node in a huge social,cultural, and economic interaction (BPAand others 1995).

Importance to communities—Various placemeanings often cross physical boundaries andseemingly conflict with one another within acertain community or culture. Whole communi-ties that depend on surrounding resources mayform images of the place in which they live. Thesame value or meaning, however, may not beshared by all the people who value that place. Forexample, a family that obtains its livelihood byharvesting timber in the Wenatchee National For-est may attach meaning to a forest as a place thatis primarily of economic benefit. Another family

that carries on a well-established tradition ofhunting deer in the same place may have a dif-ferent definition and perhaps a different emo-tional attachment to the place. Place definitionsoften differ from individual to individual andfrom family to family. One location often be-comes “several places.”

At a larger scale, individuals within a communitymay interpret a place somewhat differently. Yetthere are broad experiential patterns expressed ina collective sense by the members of a communi-ty. Thus, people frequently share a communalinterpretation of place.

This communal interpretation of place is evi-denced in the way in which various culturalgroups tend to attach different meanings to aplace. For one group, a place may be where theyearn their living. That same place may be whereanother group goes to engage in recreationalactivities. For yet another, it may be a place ofgreat spiritual significance, steeped in ancestralimportance. For each group, however, there is acommonality among members of attachment to aplace.

Tuan (1974, 1977) speaks of peoples’ attachmentto places and settings as a collective expressionof their psychological, emotional, and intellectualvalues. Along this line, Harris (1994) further sug-gested that place values can be both personal,reflecting peoples’ individual identities and his-tories, and social, in which they are defined sym-bolically by a community. Lopez (1989) speaksabout place in a similar tone, saying that placesbind people to one another and cumulatively tothe landscapes that sustain and nurture them.

Whether Lewiston, Idaho, or Camp Sherman,Oregon, communities give places names thatprovide an illustration or image of a regionalconsciousness and a strong sense of ownership orattachment. Within the United States in 1970, 3.5million places had been given names; an averageof one “named place” for every square mile. Anestimated additional million place names exist,which have never been recorded (Stewart 1970).Local place names can help create a feeling thatmay represent the community’s image of their

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place. This image provides insight into the waysin which residents see, experience, and interprettheir place. For individuals, place names signifyspecific geographic areas that are distinctively setapart from all other places. These places do nothave to be centers of national attention but maybe as simple as the overgrown site of an early set-tler’s cabin (i.e., Settler’s Grove, Idaho). To thepeople who live in, engage in recreational activi-ties in, or otherwise value these places, they arediscretely meaningful. As an example, a place inwhich a family lost their devoted pet was namedLost Pup Creek, although U.S. Geological Sur-vey maps indicate it to be Cottonwood Creek,Washington. Although hundreds of creeks linedwith cottonwoods exist, this place had extraordi-nary meaning to a particular family. The vernac-ular name was adopted when people in the com-munity heard about the incident, showing howgeographic locations maintain significance as dis-tinct places to various people and communities.

Based on applications within the basin, it seemsthat the meanings people attribute to a givenplace are apt to change according to the contextof various interactions with that place. Kruger(1996) suggested that places can become bothmeaningful and valuable based on the relationspeople have with other people and the interac-tions they share within these places. Each indi-vidual’s perception of place may be altered some-what by their personal experiences to conform tothe definitions established as larger communitypatterns. Two different ways of perceiving aplace exist: one obtained from their personal ex-periences and the other a shared perception withother people in their community, business, family,or group. This proved to be the case in the assess-ment of peoples’ identification and understandingof places within the basin project test areas.3

Supporting this observation, Harris (1994) indi-cated that spiritual meanings associated withnatural places often carry with them a sense ofcohesiveness when expressed as a community.

3 The Sylvies area, near Burns, Oregon, and the Yakima areain Washington were selected and used by various disciplinesfor testing methods and hypotheses during the assessment.

Importance to natural resource managers—Harris (1994) noted that many of the obvious de-ficiencies of past resource management planningendeavors can be directly attributed to a failure totie human, natural, and physical systems to par-ticular places. Land and resource planningmodels of the 1970s and 1980s frequently appliedhigh-technology abstract economic models in anattempt to take a more scientific approach to re-source management, yet provided few connec-tions4 among lands, resources, and their meaningsto people. Considerable attention was paid to bio-physical “scientific knowledge” as a foundationfor directing environmental management (Dustin1994).

The integration of social science into natural re-source management is still relatively new tomany public agencies. Until recently, ecologicalapproaches to managing resources on publiclands have, by and large, ignored the input ofsocial scientists because applying their sugges-tions was difficult in practical strategies. Thus, inthe attempts of resource managers to approachcomplex resource management issues, social ele-ments generally were slighted in favor of themore traditional biophysical approaches to publicland and resource management. This resulted inan expanded detachment of people from the re-source planning process and a seemingly strongeremphasis on commodity production. Althoughthe emphasis on biophysical scientific knowledgewas an aid to the tangible, commodity values ofnatural resources, it did little to affect the think-ing of agencies about human relations to re-sources. Stated simply, “the value of the landwas defined by its use” (Williams 1995).

Today, one of the greatest challenges of eco-system management is to make the necessaryconnections between biophysical and social ele-ments. Place, as a social reality, is a logical ap-proach for establishing such a connection. To

4 The Forest Service’s Recreation Opportunity Spectrum(ROS) and Visual Management System (VMS) were twoexamples of attempts to connect resources and theirmeanings to people.

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sincerely apply ecosystem management princi-ples, “place management” must become asessential as key wildlife habitats or productivetimber sites to agencies like the Forest Serviceand the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)(Williams 1995).

Place Roles in Natural ResourcePlanningUntil the 1990s, planning approaches that re-cognize human values, emotions, experiences,benefits, and satisfaction were not prominent inresource managing agencies. Even today, somecritics from both within and outside these agen-cies consider such social factors of little rele-vance in resource assessment, planning, anddecisionmaking. Natural resource managementhas traditionally been perceived by its relationssolely to the physical environment or economicsystems: objective, tangible, and essential. Intan-gible features were relevant only if they could becommodified, turned into economic goods. Thisproduction-commodity metaphor resulted in theidentification of primarily shallow, narrow placemeanings.

A communication-integration tool—Placesprovide management with a “shared learning”opportunity among various disciplines (Kruger1996). Places can present the necessary contex-tual setting to achieve collaboration and integra-tion among various disciplinary functions byallowing scientists to display the human signifi-cance of places in a manner consistent with thespatial displays of other location-specific re-source needs and preferences. Critical habitatfor a given wildlife species within a certain geo-graphic location can be compared to humansignificance and meaning of that same place.A place containing significant elk habitat, forexample, also may have great significance toAmerican Indians as a traditional root field.Places, and their human meanings, provide acommon ground for displaying human habitatneeds along with other needs, thereby allowingdecisionmakers to compare tradeoffs for one spe-cies (elk or humans) that may be deemed moreimportant than another within a given place. In a

similar manner, and at a larger scale, the applica-tion of place can foster communication andintegration between the biophysical and socialsciences in the ecosystem assessment and analy-sis processes by defining geographic spaces andtheir meanings to people. As a conscious inter-pretation of what humans experience, the realityof place may serve as a common denominator and“language of connectiveness” (Hiss 1991) amongsocial, biophysical, and economic concerns. Asan example, scenic beauty and biodiversity maybe shared values of the same place.

Developing alternatives and decisionmaking—A place can be as small as a single sitting rock oras large as a continent. In theory, the various sizesof places are boundless. In applying the reality ofplace to an actual assessment and planning proj-ect, however, it is necessary to define the mostappropriate size of places to be considered. Thisis necessary to ensure consistency throughout thebasin and complete coverage of an enormousassessment area within a relatively narrowtimeframe.

In his discussion on scale, Williams (1995) saidthat “the most appropriate strategy is to discoverthe most effective scale empirically by starting ata relatively fine scale and work up with experi-ence and knowledge.” Williams refers to Vayda’s(1983) method of working progressively upwardin scale, starting with the smallest practical level,as “progressive contextualization.” Although pro-gressive contextualization makes sense theoreti-cally, it seems that any progression to scaleslarger than places defined at the community level(i.e., generally the size of places defined by com-munity representatives in the test area applica-tions), may be less meaningful to resource ana-lysts and planners from a practical standpoint.This is because most place meanings at scaleslarger than communities tend to become abstractand may not be meaningful to the planning andmanagement of geographically specific resources.Also, communities may be able to identify impor-tant, yet subtle, details concerning a place and itsattributes that may be overlooked at larger scales.

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Incorporating a community definition of place asa threshold for addressing diverse public valuesconcerning public lands and resources within thebasin is not only feasible but fundamental. Inhis discussion on national and global economicrealities, Mayor of Missoula, Montana, DanielKemmis (1990) promotes this application, sug-gesting a conscious focus on place through build-ing strong, local communities. He notes that thedevelopment of place-focused economies requiresgroups and individuals to cultivate new and stablepatterns of cooperation that he calls “patterns ofrelationship.” Kemmis adds credence to commu-nity identification and meanings of place inpublic policy and decisionmaking by suggestingthat members of a community are unified throughtheir interpretation of a place as “valuable,” orsimply because members of a community dwellin a place in a certain habitual manner. Suchunification in the identity and interpretation ofplaces is an obvious indicator of the importanceof place considerations in planning standards andguidelines.

For land and resource management planning,standards and guidelines suggest the way inwhich management activities will achieve desiredconditions and objectives. In preparing standardsand guidelines, managers and planners must beaware of the significance of places because theyare the media through which social and economicvalues associated with various geographic areasare described and later monitored. The assess-ment of places, especially when defined at thecommunity level, is a logical way in which con-stituents can play active roles in defining themeanings and characteristics important to them.Standards and guidelines may not address everyminute attribute used to identify a place and itsmeanings, yet repeated or conflicting values ex-pressed for a certain place attribute would prob-ably indicate such consideration.

Standards and guidelines that are vague or ge-neric (i.e., that ignore the significance of beinggeographically specific or that are not shaped bythe meanings and themes associated with places)will be difficult to implement. Additionally,

vague standards and guidelines will be evenmore difficult for stakeholders to understandor support.

A knowledge of places having high values to hu-mans as well as an understanding of the signifi-cant meanings and images that places have toindividuals within a community should allowplanners, managers, and decisionmakers to betterarticulate standards and guidelines that will main-tain the salient characteristics of those places. Awide range of alternatives often will imply a widerange of environmental effects within specificgeographic areas. As long as planners understandthe identity, meanings, and images of specificplaces, the effects of each management alterna-tive are usually predictable. Following is anexample of using place in the formulation ofalternatives:5

The Little Naches River in the Wenatchee Na-tional Forest is a place that has historically been apopular recreational area of regional significancedue to attractive fishing, camping, sightseeing,day hiking and off-road vehicle opportunities.Anthropologists have documented this scenicwatershed to have been used by humans as asource for fish, roots, and berries, and for otherhuman uses over thousands of years. Addition-ally, the river provides significant anadromousfish habitat for at least two threatened species(salmon and bull trout). Apparently recreationistsare negatively affecting sensitive fisheries andcultural resources in some parts of the watershed,thereby causing land managers to considerchanges in current management strategies.

Traditional alternative solutions for the futuremanagement of the Little Naches might addressthe recreational opportunities, unique culturalsignificance, and biological importance of thisplace and suggest a higher degree of importancefor one or more of these important values. Byusing the traditional approach, each managementalternative may suggest ways of emphasizing theimportance of one valued resource at the expense

5 Personal communication. 1995. Sue Marvin, archeologist,Wenatchee National Forest, 301 Yakima St., P.O. Box 811,Wenatchee, WA 98807.

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of down-playing the significance of others. Re-moving recreationists from the Little Naches is analternative that would probably benefit fisheriesand prevent degradation of cultural values. Manyunhappy recreationists, however, would be dis-placed through such an action, and perhaps anacceptable substitute offering similar recreationalopportunities does not exist. The traditional top-down approach consists of resource managersanalyzing the situation, developing alternativesbased on physical and biological scientific data,comparing the alternatives, then presenting thepublic a preferred management plan.

By including the public in the identificationof the general meanings of a place, it may be-come apparent to the land manager that signifi-cant places within the larger identity of a placeexist. An entire watershed does not need to beallocated to recreational pursuits, nor does anentire stream need to be off limits to anglers andwaders. The combinations of all attributes of asetting are expressed by the people who value aplace and contribute to the real meanings of aplace. As the meanings of a place are analyzed interms of specific characteristics, opportunities forresolution become apparent. Some portions of theLittle Naches will be especially significant forrecreational opportunities. Various groups of rec-reationists would probably be happy to assistwith the identification of these especially impor-tant places.

Places such as the “balance rock” at SalmonFalls, in Washington, may hold special culturalsignificance to American Indians. Other placeswithin the Little Naches, such as key spawningbeds along the stream, also will be of extremelyhigh value. These significant places within largerplaces may sometimes be separate and may inother situations overlap. When significant placesare separate or do not overlap, management al-ternatives can simply address each resource byusing traditional “zoning” approaches. Overlap-ping place meanings often occur when humanvalues and biological values are attached to thesame place. When place meanings overlap, con-sistencies may exist among place meanings that

suggest resolution. For example, if recreationistsare aware of the significance of the Little Nachesas a key salmon and bull trout habitat, they maybe willing to cooperate in ensuring its conserva-tion. Interpretive signing, brochures, media an-nouncements, and other techniques could be ap-plied to educate recreationists concerning thesensitivity of other resources in the watershed. Inoverlapping situations, discontinuing the use ofsensitive riverbanks by off-road vehicles to pro-mote ecological values may be most acceptablebecause individuals have said that the salmon(and bull trout) are of significant value to them.Thus, a management alternative might deal witha combination of zoning various portions of theLittle Naches for recreational uses and spawninggrounds. Providing interpretive material to visi-tors in areas where overlapping values existshould help managers to educate the publicabout why a combination strategy provides forthe maintenance of place characteristics for alloverlapping values. As a bonus, interaction be-tween communities of interest and agency plan-ners often provides a shared sense of ownershipin the general planning process and its outcomes.

Place management does not imply that a settingwill always be managed to satisfy all the diverseexpectations of that place. Obviously, when placemeanings and values overlap, there may be win-ners and losers. However, by considering theimages and themes associated with a place and bydiscussing the real meanings with communities ofinterest and other stakeholders early in the proc-ess, land managers can be better equipped toknow how significant the various overlappingvalues are, where they are most likely to occur,and how they may best be resolved.

A medium for predicting change—A specificbioregion and its resources offer various possibil-ities from which a community can make econom-ic and lifestyle choices. Choices are based on theoccupational backgrounds, technological ability,and ideological visions of residents concerninghow the landscape should be used and shaped.When identifying the visions of people concern-ing the use and shaping of human landscapes,place is a logical medium. Assessing place pro-

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vides an approach that spatially models humanperceptions and expectations as a form of “socialinteraction.” Such an assessment suggests thatpeople interact with their environments physi-cally, psychologically, and spiritually. For ecolog-ical planning and analysis projects, understandingplace assessment is a significant tool for predict-ing changes to human environments.

The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Manage-ment Project (ICBEMP) of the Pacific NorthwestResearch Station speculates that the identificationof places, even at the relatively large scale ofecological subsections,6 can provide increasedcommunity cohesion, acceptance of others, andgeneral understanding of potential changes ingeographic areas. Discussions with communitysubjects showed an underlying concern: peopledo not want their places to change. Changes,according to several people interviewed, couldbe unsettling to communities if not handled withsensitivity. This concern alone is enough to sug-gest the importance of considering place in mak-ing management decisions.

When any of the attributes that comprise a mean-ingful place are threatened by any type of change,whole communities may come to the defense oftheir “place.” Brunson (1993) defended thispoint, suggesting that even carefully considered,scientifically justified management practices thatchange the characteristics of a place are unlikelyto be accepted by people to whom that settinghas special meaning or value. In fact, social im-pacts might even occur as a result of the mere an-nouncement of a proposed change (Greider andGarkovich 1994).

Changes to place attributes that are unsolicited orthat occur without consideration for the expecta-tions and sensitivities of all the cultural commun-ities that attach value to a given place can bedamaging. For example, a sensitively designed

6 The ICBEMP realizes that assigning place names tosubsections is not the same as inventorying community-defined places obtained through interactions with the public,yet it is a scale that does seem to be of value in ecoregionassessments.

proposed campground along the banks of theMetolius River in central Oregon appeared toForest Service recreation specialists as a simplemodification to the natural environment, intendedto meet increasing pressures for river experi-ences. To the people who hold stake in theMetolius River, however, any changes to thisplace may be viewed as a direct threat to thefundamental meaning of their cultural commu-nity. The true sensitivities of the proposed camp-ground site were apparent in public meetingswhere the proposed “improvements” were dis-played. Once public sentiment concerning thecampground proposal was understood, the agencydropped the proposal. Without a thorough under-standing of the meanings of a place to all thestakeholders, even well-meaning managementdecisions can create unintentioned results.

Natural changes that affect any of the salient at-tributes within a place, like the results of floodsor insect epidemics in forested landscapes, areusually acceptable to people (Litton 1984).Brunson (1993) suggested that this is becausenatural disturbances, or “acts of God,” are notpreventable and, therefore, must be acceptable.But there is no universal acceptance for changesin place attributes. The acceptability of anychange, whether natural or human induced, mustbe considered within the larger context of eachmeaningful place and its general image. For ex-ample, power transmission towers and lines aregenerally accepted as part of an expected imageor theme in urban areas but may not be accept-able by all people in a wildland forest setting be-cause they cause undesirable changes to vegeta-tion and other natural elements of a forestedlandscape.

Place themes are descriptions of shared meaningsthat apply to broad areas. In various levels of re-source management analysis and planning, placethemes are a baseline description for predictingthe potential effects of a management alternative.For the broad scales used in ecosystem analysisand planning, place themes use land and resourceplanning terminology describing relative degreesof naturalness or human development. This termi-nology will be discussed in more detail later.

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Predictions can be made concerning changes inthemes anticipated through the application of onemanagement alternative over another. One alter-native, for example, may suggest urban growthand a subsequent reduction in the acres of for-ested lands within places having similar combina-tions of characteristics. If such a change were as-sumed to be drastic enough to alter the majorplace theme from forested lands to agriculturallands (an example might be the creation of inten-sively managed tree farms), it might express a de-viation in the way some people living within thatplace relate to or depend on their diminishingnatural appearing settings. Some residents maymove to other places that offer the setting beingthreatened or lost. Others may express discomfortwith the changing image of their place7 butremain.

Place themes are used in ecosystem assessmentsand analyses to index the general images of aplace based on its relative degree of develop-ment or degrees of naturalness. Other planningand analysis tools, such as the Forest Service’sScenery Management System (SMS) and Recrea-tion Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) also incorpo-rate this aspect of places in their descriptions ofscenic character and physical setting indicators.

The local images or themes of a place are madeup of both the physical environment (what itlooks like) and a community understanding ofthe area (Ryden 1993). As previously pointed out,residents within a community tend to maintain anindividual, personal attachment to a place butalso maintain a somewhat shared feeling aboutthat place within larger geographic and experi-ential patterns.

Other research (Ryden 1993) confirms this ob-servation, thereby suggesting that people’s senseof place involves themes, including conflictingthemes such as those associated with the use ofan area. As demonstrated earlier in the exampleof the logger and the deer hunter using the same

7 Personal communication. 1995. Keith Bennett, economist,Upper Columbia Basin Environmental Impact StatementTeam, Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Managementproject, 112 E. Poplar Street, Walla Walla, WA 99362.

place in the Wenatchee National Forest differ-ently, local definitions of a place are sometimesdominated by the economic or recreational pur-suit of resources within or next to a particularplace. This may be the reason people of a generalregion tend to develop a common set of themes(and interpretations of those themes). In otherwords, a place is often defined by its uses and bythe activities occurring in it. Thus, it can be sur-mised that place themes are an indication of peo-ples’ general interpretations (and perhaps theirexpectations) of a geographic area.

Each place is often redefined and molded to fitthe various definitions of the people who experi-ence it. The Metolius River in central Oregon isa good example of this. The Metolius is an ex-tremely significant place to many people and hasdifferent meanings to various people. Althoughother physically similar rivers exist with equallyattractive scenery and recreational opportunities,another river cannot possibly be substituted forthe Metolius because traditional, spiritual, andemotional meanings to people are not the same.

Most people consider the image or theme of theMetolius as a primarily natural appearing, wild-land scenic stream. Yet, it has different and di-verse meanings to the various communities whoexperience it. To the enthusiastic angler, it is aseries of trout-filled, enticing pools connected bya ribbon of icy cold and crystal clear water. Tothe geologist, it is a classic example of the inter-play of faulting, volcanism, and ground-waterhydrology, and is listed in well-recognized fieldguides, college textbooks, and geologic literature.To the elder Warm Springs tribal members, it isthe legendary weeping woman whose husband(nearby Green Ridge) chased away all the deerand elk in the area in a fumbled huntingendeavor.

To grandparents and their grandchildren, it iswhere lifelong pleasant memories of campingamong the magnificent ponderosa pines andwading in chilly shallows along meanderingbanks can be perpetuated (fig. 2).

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As stated before, the images or themes attachedto various places throughout the basin assessmentarea and the importance they have to local com-munities cannot be overlooked. Without a sensi-tivity for the significance of both naturally andculturally altered landscapes to various communi-ties, scientifically correct management decisionsmay unintentionally alter the salient elements of aplace. To Liberty residents in Washington, for ex-ample, the obliteration of mining sites, perhaps asa well-intentioned landscape restoration effort,might result in eradicating a major component oftheir cultural identity.

In his proposed “spirituality opportunity spec-trum,” Harris (1994) supports the inventorying ofplace themes. He suggests an expansion of theForest Service’s ROS to include the identificationand classification of places (along with other eco-system elements) as a way of showing relationsand interactions between people and places.Harris also proposes a systematic process foridentifying a taxonomy of diverse settings to ac-commodate a spectrum of personal and spiritualexperiences within the spiritual, emotional, andexperiential realms of people-nature interactions.

A similar range of themes has been established inthe basin assessment as a means of identifyingand logically grouping the symbolic meanings ofa particular area or place based on its degree ofnaturalness.

As stated earlier, places do not have to be na-tional centers of cultural attention to be signif-icant. Local residents in the Yakima, Washington,area have their “special places” that they do notpublicize because they do not want to encouragepeople from outside the area to visit these placesand thereby alter their settings. Virtually anyphysical place has the potential to symbolizemany different experiential places (Greider andGarkovich 1994). Every place has importance tosomebody, and every place has at least oneidentifiable theme.

Ryden (1993) not only supports the idea thatvarious large geographic areas have identifiableplace themes but states that such themes are anindication of how people perceive their environ-ments in a general sense. People travelingthrough a portion of the Kittitas Valley tend tohave a general impression of what the majorlandscape theme is for that area. They are prob-ably aware of the geometric orchards and planted

Figure 2—Metolius River incentral Oregon. (Illustrationcourtesy of Traci Mc.Merritt[1995])

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fields, rolling grasslands and shrub-covered hillssurrounding the valley floor, and commercialhubs like the city of Ellensburg, Washington. In-dividuals also are able to describe the agriculturalsounds and smells of the place, and their experi-ences in this environment are not only identifi-able but meaningful.

Changes in place themes can be used as a medi-um for identifying the relative significance ofbroad social expectations. One way this can beaccomplished is by considering the juxtapositionof one place (or subsection) with its surroundingneighbors. For example, people living in theEllensburg area might have a multifaceted imageof the Kittitas Valley as a place. Their image maybe composed of both the natural and the culturallandscapes surrounding the valley. Residents maybe aware of the working landscape, the urban oragricultural aspects of their place, and the naturalappearing forested lands adjoining the valley.They might depend on the working landscape asa part of the place in which they earn a living,whereas the natural landscape is the place inwhich they seek recreational experiences. Tomost people in the Ellensburg area, one environ-ment cannot be separated from the other, neitherplace is more important than the other, and theyfeel comfortable in either setting.

Place Assessment MethodsWilliams (1995) defines four approaches for clas-sifying, inventorying, and spatially delineatinglandscapes based on the salient meanings or prop-erties of place. They are (1) scenic-aesthetic—the use of formal models from landscape archi-tecture and environmental psychology to mapphysical characteristics, place themes, visualcharacter, and scenic integrity of various land-scapes; (2) activity-goals—the traditional, utili-tarian philosophy behind natural resource man-agement in which meanings are assigned togeographic units by assessing their capacity topromote behavioral and economic goals; (3)cultural-symbolic—the human emotional, spir-itual, and symbolic identification with place,often referred to as the sense of place, where nat-ural resources are valued not only for functional

purposes but also places to which people, as acommunity, are attracted and become attached;and (4) individual-expressive—the potential forpeople to assign highly individualized meaningsto places as a mechanism by which they constructand affirm a “sense of self.” These are not merelyinventory terms, or static place attributes.

These four approaches can be viewed as differentmethods for assessing place meanings rangingfrom the very broad (scenic-aesthetic) to the morefamiliar, often personal (individual-expressive).A Forest Service or BLM unit manager may con-sider all four levels when preparing a watershedor site analysis where the geographic area is re-latively small and the desired level of specificityis high. At larger scales like the basin ecoregion,where place inventories are comparably exten-sive, it would probably be unreasonable toattempt to identify individual-expressive placemeanings.

There is an inherent difference between the iden-tification of places and their overall meanings.The task of resource managing agencies is both toreflect the place meanings that are “out there” inthe public’s mind or on the ground, and to partici-pate in constructing those meanings. Thus, plan-ning becomes a place-meaning creation process(Williams 1995). Communities share consistentdefinitions of places and their overall meanings.Although not all members of a community willhave the same depth of understanding, neitherwill place boundaries defined by various mem-bers always align; there is a shared compassionfor both the natural and cultural aspects of theirlandscapes. Later, this section will discuss broadclassifications that emphasize degrees of natural-ness or development. These classifications aresimplified for this ecoregion assessment into arange of place themes.

Place assessment establishes place meanings byusing an integrated approach between agencyrepresentatives and some of the people whovalue the places of the basin. Place assessmenthas been applied in the basin at two differentlevels: community-defined places and some-what larger places at the ecological subsection

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level. This section describes each of these levels,their application, and their broad meanings interms of how places are perceived within thebasin.

Community Perception of PlaceMeanings in the Test AreasDuring the past two decades, several researchersand social scientists have done inventories onplaces and their meanings on public lands. Forthe most part, however, these inventories seem tohave been activity-goal oriented and have focusedon identifying the boundaries and meaning of in-dividual, site-specific places (the Forest Service’stimber stand inventories and site indices are twoexamples). The application of place as a pragmat-ic assessment and planning instrument in theYakima, Washington, and Silvies, Oregon, testareas is perhaps the first large-scale use inecoregion assessment and planning. These testareas were used by various disciplines for testingvarious methods and hypotheses.8 Although thetest area application was not conclusive in everyrespect, it provided substantial insight into howplace assessment can be used in various levels ofresource analysis and planning.

Identification of places—Interview procedureswere developed for the two selected test areasand then applied. In addition to more than 30BLM and Forest Service employees, 53 publicsubjects were interviewed. The 53 subjects in-cluded resort employees, motel managers, em-ployees at chambers of commerce, state fish andgame personnel, American Indian representatives,individuals engaging in recreational activities,and individuals or small groups visiting portionsof each test area.

Community contacts were approached directlyin or near recreation sites, community busi-nesses, and chamber of commerce offices. Theseincluded individuals associated with businesses

8 Two additional informal test areas also were analyzed byForest Service personnel using techniques similar to thoseused in the test areas: Hells Canyon National RecreationArea and the western portion of the Blue Mountains(Umatilla National Forest and adjacent BLM land).

and chambers of commerce and individualsmerely walking by such sites. Interviewers firstapproached subjects, asked for a few minutes oftheir time, briefly explained the context of thequestions that would be asked, then went on withquestioning in an informal manner. Each person,family, or group interviewed was told that theirnames were not needed, that their participationwas purely voluntary, and that anything theywanted to say would be confidential (i.e., notattributed to them as individuals).

Once individuals understood what was beingasked of them through a simple oral explanationby interviewers, they were quite willing to vol-unteer the names, locations, and meanings asso-ciated with places within the study areas. Notevery place mentioned was indicated on compos-ite maps for each test area. Generally, if a placewas mentioned by only one person or family, itwas considered too specific for the project assess-ment but may be of value at other scales of landand resource management analysis and planning.If two or more individuals, families, or groupsdescribed the same general location for a placethat had meaning to them, it was noted as a“community-defined place.”

The following seven open-ended questions deal-ing with the identification of places by individ-uals was developed:

1. Do you live in this area? If not, where do youlive?

2. Are there locations or places in this area, orelsewhere in the (Silvies or Yakima) area thatyou think of as a “special place” for whateverreason?

3. Are some of these locations or places also con-sidered important to your friends, neighbors,relatives, or other people in your community?(If the person or group was obviously engagingin an activity that gave him or her an identitywith a specific group, such as anglers or off-road vehicle riders, this question was expandedto include other flyfishers, motorcyclists, etc.)

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4. Could you take just a minute to show us wherethose places are? (A schematic map9 of thegeneral area showing roads, land ownership,landmarks, cities, etc., was handed to each in-dividual, family, or group, attached to a clip-board when outdoors, along with a pencil).

5. What do you call those places? Do yourfriends, relatives, neighbors, etc., have thesame names for these places, or do they callthem something else?

6. If you could describe what you feel is impor-tant about each of those places you have talkedabout or have shown us on the map in just afew words, what would you say?

7. Can you tell us anything about how youwould like to see each of those places han-dled in the future? (Rather than “managed,”the word “handled” was used to incorporatemanagement activities, consumptive and non-consumptive uses, administrative controls,etc.)

The maps on which people penciled place loca-tions were compiled manually. Two notebook-sized maps were handed to individuals as part ofthe interview method. One was a black and whitecopy of the state road map for the general area,illustrating the general location and major roadsand attractions in the area. The other was acolored Xerox map that showed the test area en-larged so that more detail was discernible.

After making several community contacts, collec-tive patterns within various responses began toemerge. In some locations, the similarities amongthe patterns in the comments of community rep-resentatives were remarkable. For example, al-though its name does not appear on maps of thearea, a geographic place referred to as the “Nile”was identified by several separate Yakima com-munity members and apparently had a great dealof shared significance to each of them. Inter-viewers never found anyone who would tell themwhere the name “Nile” originated, although the

9 Colored maps were at a scale of 1:1000000 and were8.5 by 11 inches in size.

area seemed to have significance as a favoritefishing and day use recreational area. Althoughthe boundary lines that people identified were notalways the same, the general areas they describedwere quite similar. Apparently, to several com-munities within the Yakima test area, the “Nile”is a meaningful place.

It was not possible to delineate all community-defined places in the entire basin given time con-straints. The application of this idea for the twotest areas within the basin has been completedand establishes a reliable method for others tofollow in subsequent planning endeavors.

Examples of community-defined places for thetwo test areas are provided in figures 3 and 4.

Interview results—Following is a summary ofthe interview results, based on the seven ques-tions asked by interviewers.

1. Of the 53 individuals interviewed, 38 (72percent) lived in the general area where theinterview was conducted. The remaining15 individuals (28 percent) were visiting fromlocations outside the area, usually severalhours’ travel time away.

2. Fifty individuals (94 percent) were able to de-scribe places that were significant to them oncethey understood what the interviewer wasasking for. More than half of the people whodescribed places of importance to them beganby describing very small, detailed places ofindividual importance. Further discussion withthe interviewer was necessary before individ-uals were able to understand that the identityof larger places was sought.

3. Nearly all (83 percent) of the places identifiedby people were thought to be of importance totheir friends, family members, and communi-ties. This may have been due to the way inwhich the description of “larger places” wasexpressed by the interviewer.

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Figure 3—Community-defined places inthe Silvies area.

Figure 4—Community-defined places in the Yakima area.

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4. Most, 46 individuals (87 percent), of the peo-ple interviewed were willing to indicate thelocations of places important to them on amap, although only 43 percent of the peopleinterviewed actually drew on the maps pro-vided. It was common for people to use theeraser end of a pencil to sketch the generalvicinity of a place, leaving an eraser-dust trailthat was less precise (and certainly less per-manent) than a hard line. People seemed morewilling to discuss the overall images of placesthey described, and the people who live there,rather than feeling compelled to indicatelocations on a map.

5. People interviewed usually described placesusing descriptors other than basic landscapeelements. While the interviewers were at-tempting to identify place locations on theirmaps with topographic features or vegetativechanges, community members were talkingabout the type of people who recreate and livein the location, or the condition of the roads.

6. Most people interviewed, 46 individuals (87percent), were able to attach names to placeswith which they were familiar, and felt thattheir friends and neighbors would probablyuse the same names. Spellings of place namesseemed to differ, however.

7. Nearly half, 26 of the people interviewed (49percent), discussed degrees of human altera-tion when they were asked to describe the gen-eral meanings of places they identified. Manydescribed places on public lands as being“natural,” “wild,” or even “wilderness” evenwhere some degree of human alteration wasnoticeable. On private lands, people describedcurrent land uses as the “meaning” of places.The “wine country” in the lower YakimaValley, and the orchards around Ellensburgwere mentioned by several individuals.

8. All but 26 individuals (51 percent of thoseinterviewed) said that they did not want theplaces they described to change, althoughmany felt that they probably would changeover time, even if human activity was minimal.

Identification of place themes—

Changing everywhere, America changesfastest west of the 100th meridian.Mining booms, oil booms, irrigationbooms, tourist booms as at Aspen andSun Valley, crowd out older populationsand bring in new ones. Communities losetheir memory along with their character.(Stegner 1992)

This section focuses on an alternative mappingapproach. It describes how the scenic-aestheticmeanings of place are also identified and mappedin an ecoregion assessment. In this discussion, thescenic-aesthetic meanings of place are consid-ered a component of the cultural-symbolicmeanings of place.

Interviews with community representatives sug-gest that people often begin to identify them-selves with a place through extensive interactionwith that place and with the people who live in orvisit that place. In several instances, people inter-viewed could not express who they were withoutexpressing the setting within which they live,work, and play.10 This geographic component inpersonal identity becomes apparent in discussionswith people from a specific place like Mill Creek,or a general place like the Idaho Panhandle. Typi-cally, such an identity often becomes a communi-ty’s self-definition of what may potentially domi-nate a region for generations (Greider and Garko-vich 1994). To the land and resource manager, itmay be regarded as an indication of sensitivityconcerning how people feel about a certain placeand its resources. Similarities in how people ex-pressed such an attachment led interviewers tobelieve that the scenic and symbolic definitionscommunity representatives used also could beused to classify large areas under a set of placethemes.

10 Personal interviews with public participants conducted byJon Bumstead of the ICBEMP in February 1995.

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Although not everyone agreed all the time, peopleinterviewed described places of importance tothem with words and meanings that generallywere similar. From their words and comments,conclusions may be drawn to describe all basinlandscapes within a range of themes11 that de-scribe the physical (scenic-aesthetic) and exper-iential (cultural-symbolic) meanings of places tothe people who value them. Although they aremore land use oriented, the following five themesportray a spectrum of place images from naturedominated, like wildernesses and wild and scenicrivers, to those that are culturally dominated, likecities and suburban developments.

4. Forest and shrub-grasslands12 (naturallyevolving) consist of lands that have a vegetativecover of either forest species (large trees creatingthe walls and ceilings of visual space), shrub,forb, or grass species that are in a naturallyevolving state (Pollock 1981). This means thathuman intervention (manipulation or develop-ment, etc.) is at a very minimum or nonexistentlevel; natural processes appear to dominatevisually. Examples are wilderness areas orResearch Natural Areas.

5. Forest lands (natural appearing) consist oflands that have a vegetative cover of forest spe-cies (large trees creating the walls and ceilingsof visual space) in a natural appearing state orcondition. In other words, human interventionmay be evident but does not necessarily dominatethe natural landscape. Examples include thescenic or recreation portions of wild and scenicrivers, scenic byways, etc.

11 Place themes are based on comments obtained from thesurvey and applied to a common set of landscape themesoriginally described in the Forest Service’s SceneryManagement System (SMS) (USDA Forest Service 1995).Survey comments paralleled the “land use” oriented themesof the SMS so closely that the authors made the decision touse one spectrum to describe the place images expressed bypeople interviewed.

12 This theme is actually two themes forest lands (naturallyevolving) and shrub-grasslands (naturally evolving), but wascombined due to the very small amounts of naturallyevolving shrub-grasslands occurring in the basin.

6. Shrub-grasslands (natural appearing) in-clude lands that have a vegetative cover of shrub,forb, or grass species (small trees and plants thatmay create small walls of visual space, but nooverhead plane or ceiling) that are in a naturalappearing state or condition. Human interventionmay be evident but does not dominate the naturallandscape. Examples might include nationalgrasslands or open range lands where fencingdoes not create visually dominant geometricpatterns.

7. Agricultural lands consist of “working land-scapes” having geometric patterns that visuallydominate the landscape, usually because offencing or monocrop planting and cultivationpatterns. Examples include irrigated croplandsand some dry land crops (if their field sizes aresmall enough to create discernible geometricpatterns). Also, the agricultural theme includesintensively managed timber lands that have acultivated appearance. This cultivated appearanceis most commonly apparent as geometric visualpatterns.

8. Developed areas have gridded street patterns,commercial areas, and suburban residential areas.They can range from small developed areas witha gas station, general store, restaurant, and a fewsurrounding homes (i.e., Cle Elum, Washington)to larger towns or cities with gridded street pat-terns, commercial hubs, and several residentialdevelopments (i.e., Ellensburg, Washington). Itshould be recognized that ICBEMP economistsmay be using a different definition than what isexpressed here when discussing urbandevelopments.

Ecological Subsections as PlacesIn the Forest Service’s national hierarchicalframework of ecological units (McNab and Avers1994, USDA Forest Service 1994), four majorlevels of planning and analysis are identified:ecoregion, subregion, landscape, and land unit.These correspond to appropriate ecological units,each having a general size range and purpose.Planning and analysis at the subregion level (like

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the basin) corresponds to two ecological units:sections and subsections. These normally rangefrom tens to thousands of square miles and arethe most useful units for strategic, multiforest,statewide, and multiagency analyses andassessments.

Initially, it was decided in early January 1995 thatthe place concept would be used in the basin as-sessment project; however, place assessmentwould only occur for portions of the project out-side the test areas at a larger, more general scale.Suggestions were made to consider places likecentral Oregon, the Blue Mountains, or the IdahoPanhandle. We agreed to apply place concepts atthese larger scales, but learned that the resolutionwas too coarse to be meaningful for an ecoregionassessment.

Other possibilities, such as hydrologic units andadministrative boundaries, were considered dur-ing the test area field work, but proved to besomewhat awkward for any place taxonomy thatwould be meaningful to people. Because ecologi-cal units were being mapped for the basin, theywere evaluated to see if they could be used inplace assessment. On examination, these werefound to be the best geographical reference units(within the given timeframe) for placeassessment.

Ecological units are the basic components ofBailey’s (1980, 1988) national hierarchicalframework that stratifies the earth into progres-sively smaller areas of increasingly uniform eco-logical potentials. In this framework, areas can bemapped according to associations of biotic andenvironmental factors including climate, physiog-raphy, water, soils, air, hydrology, and potentialnatural communities (ECOMAP 1993). The fac-tors that are used for the mapping are not alwaysthe same but differ with the scale of the mapping.The subsection mapping was done at a scale of1:500,000. The principle mapping criteria weregeologic materials, landform and topography, andvegetation.

Ecological units were mapped at the subsectionlevel for the basin. This mapping was accom-plished by an interagency team from the Forest

Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service,BLM, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Place themes and names were identified at theecological subsection scale for the entire basin.Fully aware of the fact that ecological subsec-tions might lack the traditional, spiritual, andemotional meanings of places defined by indi-viduals and communities in the test areas,ICBEMP decided to develop place names andthemes for the 394 subsection polygons withinthe basin. Before using subsections in the identi-fication of large-scale places, physiographicnames had been assigned to each ecologicalsubsection. Biophysical descriptions for eachsubsection also were developed. The biophysicalattributes became the foundation for developingplace names and themes for the subsections.

As previously discussed, it became apparent inthe test area interviews that people often describeplaces that are important to them using similarcharacteristics. It was common to hear peoplerefer to places with similar references to “farm-lands,” “forests” or “rangelands” when they wereasked to describe what they felt was importantabout the place they identified or how they wouldlike to see those places handled in the future.With these similarities in mind, ICBEMP devel-oped initial themes for all subsections based onnarrative descriptions of certain attributes.

The meanings of place themes—Themes areessentially a combination of the natural attributescomprising the physical character of a place andcurrent condition, which includes human or cul-tural attributes. They are not goals for futuremanagement, but merely show what currentlyexists within a broad spectrum of degrees ofnaturalness or degrees of development.

Because several themes may exist for each sub-section, due to their relatively large size, up tothree themes were allowed for each subsection,with the most dominant listed first and othersin descending order. An example showing inven-toried subsection places and their associatedthemes is shown in figure 5.

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Similar to the biophysical descriptions used,place names for subsections were based on localphysical attributes. A team of 32 Federal employ-ees who live and work within various subsectionsreviewed tentative place names. With fellow em-ployees and long-time local residents, theseemployees made necessary name adjustments andidentified the major themes for each subsectionplace based on aggregated local knowledge. Placenames, themes, and physiographic subsectionnames are currently stored in a geographic infor-mation systems (GIS) data file specifically devel-oped for this portion of the assessment. In ananalysis of this magnitude, GIS approaches offersome obvious advantages over manual analysistechniques. Besides the graphic capabilities ofsuch a system, tabular data reports also can beproduced for specific queries for use in furtheranalyses (fig. 5).

Place theme interrelations—Research indicatesthat people prefer diverse landscapes (USDAForest Service 1995). Landscapes that containhigh degrees of diversity, where there is also ahigh degree of harmony among various visualelements, have the greatest potential for highscenic value. Geographic areas containing highdegrees of scenic diversity and harmony often in-fluence neighboring geographic areas. The degreeof contrast between adjacent places is an indica-tor of the uniqueness or “importance” of inter-related places (Bennett 1994). For example, al-though the city of Ellensburg is a developedarea, the surrounding lands within the valleycontribute to the major theme of agriculturallands. The subsections to the north and west ofthe valley are the scenic backdrops of the valleyitself and have major themes of forest lands

Figure 5—Primary themes for subsections in the interior Columbia basin.

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(natural appearing). If the valley and all itssurrounding “backdrop” subsections had the sametheme, say agricultural lands, then the impor-tance of the backdrop would be diminished. Con-versely, naturally evolving forest lands adjacentto a developed area might have a greater degreeof importance than it would if it were next toanother naturally dominated theme.

A simple matrix (fig. 6) has been developed todisplay degrees of relative importance betweentwo or more adjacent subsections and their cur-rent overall place themes. In general, it can beused as an indication of relative contrasts in at-tributes. The theme interrelationship matrix illus-trates relative degrees of contrast between a givenplace and its neighbors based on current overallimages or themes that have been inventoried. Aplace with a theme that is culture dominated, such

as developed areas, has a relatively high degreeof contrast when compared to a neighboring placewith a nature-dominated theme, such as forestand shrub-grasslands (naturally evolving).Conversely, the distinction between two adjoin-ing places whose themes are similar will have arelatively low degree of contrast.

The authors postulate that places having higherdegrees of contrast have implied higher values,human dependencies, and expectations for main-tenance of existing characteristics. These areasalso may have higher potential for conflicts be-cause of the diverse values and expectations ofpeople.

Relative degrees of contrast can be used by landmanagers as an indication of place prioritieswhen considering the implementation of alterna-tives. For example, a designated wilderness

Figure 6—Theme interrelations for the interior Columbia basin.

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(theme: forest and shrub-grasslands, naturallyevolving) may be considered a higher priority formore detailed analysis and planning when thatwilderness is located adjacent to an urban area(theme: developed). Conversely, whereas arangeland (theme: forest and shrub-grasslands,natural appearing) among thousands of acres ofsimilar rangelands (same theme) may be an im-portant place to some people, it may not have thesame degree of relative significance when com-pared to its neighboring places.

Using the matrix shown (table 1), GIS programsallowing delineation of the relative importance ofplaces were prepared. By using the ecoregionsubsections as a proxy for place identification,and by using a simple weighting technique in sit-uations where more than one significant themeexists within a place, the matrix analysis gener-ated a graphic display indicating five classes ofrelative contrast for all subsections within thebasin assessment area. An example of this isshown in figure 6.

ConclusionsBurdened with increasingly complexsocial roles, we need places that supportrather than fragment our lives, placesthat balance the hard, standardized, andcost-efficient with the natural, personal,and healthful. To secure this kind of en-vironmental quality in a rapidly changingworld, we must put the principles emerg-ing from the multidisciplinary science ofplaces into practice on local and globallevels (Gallagher 1993).

Knowledge gained from test area and other ex-periences within the basin indicates that placesare not only possible but quite meaningful in eco-region assessments. Several meaningful conclu-sions can be drawn from the application of placeassessment.

1. A Connection Between People and Ecosystems

Sense of place, when applied as an ecosystemmanagement concept, serves as a medium forresource managers to interact with the people

Table 1—Theme interrelation matrixa

Degrees of contrast

Developed Agricultural Shrub- Forest Forest and shrub/Place theme areas lands grasslands (NA) lands (NA) grasslands (NE)

Forest and shrub-grasslands (NE)b High Mod.-high Mod.-low Mod.-low Low

Forest lands(NA)c Mod.-high Mod. Mod.-low Low Mod.-low

Shrub-grasslands(NA) Mod.-high Mod. Low Mod.-low Mod.-low

Agricultural lands Mod. Low Mod. Mod. Mod.-high

Developed areas Low Mod. Mod.-high Mod.-high High

a The theme interrelation matrix displays relative degrees of contrast between a place and its neighbors, based on inventoriedcurrent images or themes. A place with a theme which is culture-dominated, such as developed areas, has a relatively highdegree of contrast when compared to a neighboring place with a theme that is nature-dominated, such as forest and shrub-grasslands (naturally evolving). Conversely, the interrelation between two adjoining places whose themes are basically alikewill have a relatively low degree of contrast.

b NE = naturally evolving (essentially unaltered by humans).

c NA = naturally appearing.

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who live in, play in, or otherwise value the basin.Reversing this idea, place assessment also per-mits constituents to better understand manage-ment goals and potential changes to the landsthey value.

As social scientists and biophysical scientistsexamine the influence of environment on humansversus the effect of humans on their environment,the application of place can focus the discussion.The test area experiences indicated that human-environmental interaction is not unilinear; rather,it is perhaps an interchange between humans andtheir environment. Clarke (1971) referred to thisphenomenon as “an interactive unity of peopleand place.”

The basic idea behind ecosystem management,which stresses a similar circularity betweenpeople and their environment, requires new re-sponses from managers whose decisions oftenrearrange peoples’ surroundings. In line with theecosystem management paradigm, today’s man-agers must be aware that natural resources are nolonger considered simply raw materials to becataloged and manipulated as commodities, nor isone resource or species subliminally consideredof higher value than another when making man-agement decisions (Dustin and others, in press).Today’s managers must not only understand thecontrast of the interactive unity between peopleand place but must also know how their decisionsaffect people and place.

Test area experiences in the basin provided abetter understanding of the importance of placeconcepts. These experiences provided insightinto the emotions people experience concerningpotential changes to places they consider signifi-cant. Whereas some test area residents draw theirlivelihood from resource extraction on federallyadministered lands, others only visit these landsfor recreational pursuits. For yet another group,the meaning and importance of these lands mayexpand dramatically through historic and spiritualsignificance. Moreover, for the environmentalistliving in New Jersey, who may never venture into

the basin’s diverse places, simply knowing thatsignificant or special places exist gives them ex-istence value. These are examples of interactiveunity between people and places.

Any given place allows various human interac-tions. At first glance, divergent expectationsmight seem to collide when management objec-tives do not seem to satisfy the expectations ofdifferent interests. Places are almost always mul-tifaceted, serving as several places for several dif-ferent people or communities, often with differentmeanings for each. To a logger, the landscapes ofthe Ochoco National Forest that provide him sus-tenance also may provide him with interactiveunity having other ramifications. For example,the place where his saw creates clearings mayvery well become the place where 2 years laterhe teaches his young child to hunt. For individ-uals, there is no singular reality of place. Neitherthe logger nor the environmentalist puts a greateror lesser degree of importance or meaning on aplace (Hovee 1995). Contradictory interactionswithin places do not indicate a greater or lesserdegree of contrast or value among disparategroups.

Interactive unity between people and places,however, is often shared by several members ofthe same cultural group. This was especially trueduring the test area experiences when people dis-cussed the meanings of identified places. Obvioussimilarities in overall images or themes appearedamong community individuals who had similarbackgrounds. Greider and Garkovich (1994) con-firmed this finding, saying that the experiences ofpeople in a given place tend to be similar to ex-periences of other people who have similar cul-tural backgrounds.

The visual images that places contain have signif-icance in the general assessment process for thebasin because there are strong links between thescenic-aesthetic (Williams 1995) meanings ofplace and the cultural-symbolic meanings ofplace. For communities, there is not only an iden-tifiable common taxonomy of places and theirmeanings but also a generally consistent identifi-

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cation of images or themes for large-scale places.Incorporating community definition of places andtheir themes as a threshold for addressing diversepublic values concerning public lands and re-sources within the basin is not only feasible butnecessary.

2. Community Scale for Place Assessment

The community-defined place approach appliedin the test areas, in which people were asked toidentify places and their boundaries without anypreconceived notions concerning their extent,permitted a meaningful contribution to placeidentification.

The test area application found that the best scalefor identifying places and their meanings for eco-logical assessments is ultimately at the communi-ty level. The size range of places defined bycommunities within the test areas (Silvies andYakima) and in other portions of the project areagenerally range from 5,000 to 250,000 acres. Sev-eral individuals talked about places that were sig-nificantly smaller, such as their favorite fishinghole near a bend in the river, or much larger, suchas the Blue Mountains, but these wereexceptions.

Clearly, individual members of a community ex-pressed personal characterizations and under-standings when they were asked to describe aplace on a National Forest or on other federallyadministered lands. When these same individuals,as part of a group, were asked about their under-standing of the same place, their replies tended toconform to the group’s response. Some individ-uals asked to change the information providedafter other members of their group became in-volved in the interview and offered a differentpoint of view concerning a given place location,name, or meaning.

It became apparent to interviewers that communi-ty members identified places as named geograph-ic locations. Murphy (1991) describes this occur-rence in his discussions concerning when a spacebecomes a place. The ideological landscape, ac-cording to Murphy, has to do with how people

identify with places emotionally and symbolicallyand must be discovered empirically. As the inter-views in the Yakima and Silvies basins indicated,the emotional and symbolic meanings of placescannot be overlooked.

The 1994 Yakima and Silvies test area work sug-gests several other significant findings concern-ing community-defined places:

• An apparent shared sense of place among themembers of a community exists, although notall members have the same depth of under-standing for all places within a region.

• Various members of a community often definea given place consistently, although bounda-ries may be slightly discordant.

• Individuals expressed a shared compassionfor both the natural and cultural aspects oftheir landscapes.

• People often described the meaning or imagesof large-scale places by using general phrases(i.e., “forests, ranges, towns,” etc.), whichdescribed degrees of naturalness ordevelopment.

Although all the implications associated withthese four common elements have not been fullyinvestigated, there does seem to be a commonthread, thereby suggesting that the communitydefinition of place in ecosystem assessment beof substantial importance. The identification,taxonomy, meanings, and general images of theplaces described in the test area interviews were,at the very least, an expression of relative impor-tance for the people who know those lands. Suchindications of important areas or resources shouldbe of interest to decisionmakers when consider-ing alternative management strategies and po-tential resulting changes to those places. Under-standing community definitions of places isessential to any subsequent planning efforts.

3. Subsection Scale

Subsection analysis provided a general way ofestablishing the identity, character, and themesof relatively large places within the basin. Time

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constraints did not allow an adequate survey ofcommunity representatives throughout the 144-million-acre assessment project. Thus attempts touse place assessment at a larger, more practicalscale, resulted in an acceptable compromise.

Although defined by a relatively large scale(100,000 to 500,000 acres), ecological subsec-tions, combined with the names and themes thatlocal contacts have given them, became effectivesurrogates for community-defined places (whichare comparatively smaller at 3,000 to 100,000acres). Subsection identities and themes are use-ful in public land and resource planning for pre-dicting possible environmental changes resultingfrom management alternatives, for measuring theimportance of a place compared with neighboringplaces, and for encouraging public participationearly in the planning process. When subsectionsare used to identify places of importance to com-munities, they are somewhat limited because oftheir relatively large scale, mainly because eco-logical units tend to be limited in traditional,spiritual, and emotional meanings of place.Ecological subsections do seem to have value,however, when used as a cornerstone forindividual and community involvement in placeidentification.

4. A Medium for Expressing Change

Place themes can be used as a means of identify-ing the relative contrast of broad social expecta-tions resulting from resource managementdecisions.

As already stated, themes are an indication of thegeneral expectations of people for future manage-ment of a place. At the core of Williams’ (1995)scenic-aesthetic meaning of place, they serve asa general baseline for measuring possible long-term land use changes. They suggest a vision ofhow people believe a place ought to be managedand shaped. Changes in themes usually occurover several decades or more. Replacing appleorchards with subdivision housing developmentsmight result in converting agricultural lands todeveloped areas if done in a manner where thedevelopments are extensive enough to dominatethe image of a place. Local people who wish to

use resources now may see their needs affectedby management decisions that favor preservationof certain resources, thus altering the themes ofthe places for which they hold stake.

Theme changes in one place may have conspic-uous effects on neighboring places. This inter-relation of place themes must be a considerationin making management decisions that could resultin long-term changes to place themes. The mapshown in figure 6 may serve as a basis for identi-fying portions of the basin having a relativelyhigh degree of importance to neighboring places.It graphically presents the parts of the basin thathave the greatest relative degrees of contrastbased on contrasting themes of neighboring sub-sections. It also may suggest the highest potentialsensitivities where thematic changes may be dis-ruptive to humans. At subsequent levels of plan-ning, a similar approach at finer resolutions (suchas community-defined places) should be mean-ingful to land and resource managers. The GISprograms used in this analysis have been de-signed for application in such work at finerresolutions.

Research LimitationsThe identification of places and their meanings atthe typical scales associated with ecoregion as-sessments is not an easy undertaking. Besidesthe enormity of the basin, time constraints and alimited number of people to accomplish the taskof identifying places at the community levelpresented obstacles to universal application ofthe techniques applied in the test areas. Thefollowing are other limitations on this research

• Test area experiences led interviewers tobelieve that people have “secret” or specialplaces of such intimate importance that theymay not be revealed in any type of interview.This is probably because peoples’ feelingsabout a place, their divergent personal defini-tions of that place, and their knowledge aboutand their own experiences in that place arevery private. It seems reasonable to assume,however, that most “special places” are prob-ably smaller and more intimate in nature than

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could be considered in an ecosystem assess-ment of the magnitude of the basin project. Insimilar studies at finer resolution, this may bea more significant limitation.

• Some subjective decisions were made to in-clude or exclude identified places during theanalysis of data collected during test areainterviews. For instance, if only one individ-ual mentioned a place that he or she felt wasof importance to their community, it was notindicated on the resulting composite map.This “cut” was necessary because of timeconstraints and because of the massive scaleof the project. A larger sample size may haveresulted in further duplication of places men-tioned, thus adding a few places to the testarea composite maps.

• More comprehensive interview methods mayhave provided more concise place data. Thetest area interviews were somewhat limiteddue to short timeframes. Whereas over 50individuals and small groups contacted pro-vided meaningful data for validating placeassessment at the community level, largersamples may be necessary to fully substan-tiate the approaches suggested in this paper.

• Once places have been identified, field veri-fication to validate their actual locations andthemes seems reasonable. Time constraintsdid not allow such field verification, althoughidentified places were reviewed on maps byseveral experienced employees of Federalagencies.

• Participation by all unit representative re-source management agencies did not occuras planned.13 This forced the ICBEMP toprovide estimates for several place namesand themes in the southern Idaho portionof the project area.

13 Twenty-nine management agency units participated in theidentification of place names and themes. Only one unit didnot participate.

Recommendations andFuture Research NeedsThis paper does not suggest that the cultural-symbolic approach to place inventory is fullyoperational at this point. It merely suggests thatpeoples’ sense of place is identifiable at thecommunity scale and is also meaningful withinlarger ecological units. This paper identifies thesignificant findings of the test area experiencesand makes recommendations for future researchneeds by raising the following questions that maywarrant additional research.

• What are the appropriate surveying tech-niques and means of other data collection forassessing places, meanings, and expectationsfor various communities and user groups?What is the appropriate sample size for thisscale of analysis? How can a representativesample best be obtained? How are people whodo not live or play in the area, yet who valueits places, reached in a survey?

• Is the range of themes (from nature dominatedto culture dominated) adequate to define theoverall images of large-scale places on pub-licly managed lands?

• Does the GIS application of place themes andtheir interrelations serve as a predictive modelfor alerting the resource manager of high-priority areas where social dependencies andthe potential for conflicts are likely to behigher? What value does this analysis tech-nique have in subsequent levels of planning?

Closing ThoughtsBecause any management decision that affectsresources eventually involves location specificity,places and their meanings can no longer remainintangible and skeptical elements in the ecosys-tem management approaches of agencies to re-source analysis and planning. As long as humanlandscapes and habitats remain viable considera-tions in the management of public lands, places

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will be major factors in measuring the degree ofsuccess or failure of the management strategies ofagencies. The consequences of any managementaction also may involve the humans who interactwith the places affected by that action. As Hiss(1991) states, “The human connection to place isnot merely a close association but a continuumwith all that we are and think we are.”

AcknowledgmentsWe thank the following individuals for theirassistance.

Stewart Allen for his advice and consultationthroughout the project.

Keith Bennett for his encouragement in the areaof place interrelations, and for his unendingpatience, advice, and consultation.

Gary Ford, John Nesser, and the entire team ofprofessionals for providing a valuable library ofplace descriptions for the ecological subsectionswithin the basin.

Paul Gobster at the North Central Forest Experi-ment Station in Chicago for his professionalreview and excellent advice.

Steve Keegan for his outstanding assistance inthe Silvies test area field work.

Mary Keith for her anthropological expertise andmeaningful discussions.

Christina Lilienthal for her efficient identificationof places and superior data assistance.

Steven F. McCool for his insights, editing, andconsultation.

Traci Mc.Merritt for her professional illustrationsand computer graphic assistance.

Henry Maekawa and Barbara Jackson for theirassistance with field interviews and for compilingthe map of places in the Yakima test area.

Amy Molitor for her excellent editing andformatting suggestions.

Alison Nelson for her excellent editorialassistance.

Tammy Olson for her graphic layout andformatting expertise.

Dave Plume for creating the interrelations ofplaces GIS programs and for patiently makingcountless changes throughout the project.

Alan Redman for his interviews and datacollection in the Silvies test area, and forcoordinating all subsection place inventories andGIS data entry for the project.

Gini Stoddard for her GIS mapping assistance.

Dan Williams for his consultation and dedicationto teaching others about the significance of place.

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The Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture isdedicated to the principle of multiple use management of theNation’s forest resources for sustained yields of wood, water,forage, wildlife, and recreation. Through forestry research,cooperation with the States and private forest owners, andmanagement of the National Forests and National Grasslands, itstrives—as directed by Congress—to provide increasingly greaterservice to a growing Nation.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) prohibitsdiscrimination in all its programs and activities on the basis ofrace, color, national origin, gender, religion, age, disability,political beliefs, sexual orientation, or marital or family status.(Not all prohibited bases apply to all programs.) Persons withdisabilities who require alternative means for communication ofprogram information (Braille, large print, audiotape, etc.) shouldcontact USDA’s TARGET Center at (202) 720-2600 (voice andTDD).

To file a complaint of discrimination, write USDA, Director,Office of Civil Rights, Room 326-W, Whitten Building, 14th andIndependence Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20250-9410 or call(202) 720-5964 (voice and TDD). USDA is an equal opportunityprovider and employer.

Pacific Northwest Research Station333 S.W. First AvenueP.O. Box 3890Portland, Oregon 97208-3890

Galliano, Steven J.; Loeffler, Gary M. 1999. Place assessment: how people defineecosystems. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-462. Portland, OR: U.S. Department ofAgriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 31 p. (Quigley,Thomas M., ed.; Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project: scientificassessment).

Understanding the concepts of place in ecosystem management may allow land managersto more actively inventory and understand the meanings that people attach to the lands andresources under the care of the land manager. Because place assessment has not been usedoperationally in past large-scale evaluations and analyses, it was necessary to apply theoriesbased on available literature. From experiences in two large test areas, it was apparent thatthe most appropriate scale for place assessment was at the community level.

Keywords: Place assessment, place themes, place concepts.