Geospatial Social Data and Participatory Mapping for Landscape Change and Socio-Environmental Systems
A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 June 2019) | Viewed by 73014
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plant community ecology; urban ecology; biodiversity conservation; ecosystem services; human–environment interactions; seed dispersal; plant functional traits
Interests: human–environment connections; landscape ecology; remote sensing; plant ecology; arid rangelands; pastoralism; system dynamics models; long-term data; spatio-temporal data
Interests: landscape ecology; ecosystem services; landscape history; floodplains
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Many questions in landscape ecology involve interactions and feedbacks between humans and their environment. Considering both of these key factors in socio-environmental research is challenging, in part because environmental and social data are often collected at very different spatial grains and extents. However, data from non-authoritative sources (i.e., citizens) also provide information on what is happening in the world, often with precise geo-locations and broad extents that more closely match the scale of remotely sensed environmental and land cover data.
This Special Issue will highlight landscape and regional-scale work on human–environment linkages using spatially-explicit data generated by local communities through crowd-sourced data, social media, and participatory mapping. Geospatial social data and participatory mapping are powerful tools for examining the spatial patterns of human-environment interactions, drawing on rich and varied spatial knowledge of people and communities. Spatially referenced non-authoritative data include participatory mapping, crowd-sourced data to address particular goals, such as adding photos to maps, identifying land use features, or recording observations of species. In addition, with the widespread adoption of social media platforms, there is a new source of publicly available geo-referenced data on people’s attitudes, interests, and behavior. These data are used to understand both biophysical locations and human values for ecosystem services, and can be used in locations where data are scarce, and to create congruent social and ecological datasets. Geospatial social data and participatory mapping can also encourage communal negotiation of land stewardship, foster connections among participants, and document long-term ecological knowledge held by community members.
We invite papers on the use of social media and other crowd-sourced data to study socio-environmental systems in a spatial context, such as people’s responses to environmental hazards to cultural ecosystem services provided by parks, or the diverse ways participatory mapping has been used to understand the spatial patterns of ecosystems and landscape values. We also welcome papers on the interdisciplinary space of social-ecological systems, with a focus on participatory mapping approaches for understanding the spatial locations of ecosystems, human values, and their interactions.
Dr. Bianca LopezDr. Ginger Allington
Dr. Stephanie Tomscha
Dr. Sarah Gergel
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- landscape ecology
- ecosystem services
- participatory mapping
- social media
- crowd-sourced data
- socio-environmental systems
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