Olympic Peninsula

Phase 1 – Community Mapping Workshops

In 2010, the US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station partnered with the Institute for Culture and Ecology, an independent non-profit research organization based in Portland, to develop an approach for collecting data about the cultural values associated with the Olympic Peninsula. Human ecology mapping quickly emerged as a method that we felt would allow people to easily map those places most meaningful to them as well as the places where they participated in outdoor activities. During 2010-2011, we held mapping workshops in 8 communities on the Peninsula, collecting a wealth of data from 169 Olympic Peninsula residents. The number of participants per community workshop ranged from a low of 10 in Quilcene, a small former logging town turned bedroom community for Seattle and Olympia on the eastern side of the Peninsula, to a high of 39 in Quinault, where logging remains an important economic activity albeit at a much reduced level from the peak timber harvesting years of the 1980s. Workshop participants mapped 818 meaningful places and 1,594 outdoor activity sites.

In 2012, our team added two new partners – PSU’s Department of Geography and Institute for Sustainable Solutions – to pilot multiple approaches to analyzing the data and develop a set of maps showing the places participants valued and the areas where they participated in different types of activities. The resulting 65-page atlas, “Mapping Human-Environment Connections on the Olympic Peninsula: An Atlas of Landscape Values”, provides a detailed snapshot of where meaningful places and outdoor activity sites for residents are concentrated.

From a practical standpoint, mapping these concentrations is useful for land managers because areas where activities or meaningful places are concentrated are likely to be contentious if proposed actions will restrict access to the locations or change the sense of place associated with them. And areas with high concentrations of meaningful places or activities are also likely candidates for investments in visitor infrastructure, such as roads, trails, or information kiosks.

In addition to mapping the density of values, the PSU GIS team adapted a technique used by ecologists, the inverse Shannon’s diversity index, and applied it to the cultural values and outdoor activities data. A hypothetical example illustrates why such diversity maps might be useful for land managers. Imagine that a density analysis of the peninsula data shows equally high concentrations of values at a major lake and at a more remote but particularly spectacular rocky beach. A diversity analysis of the data, however, shows that five different types of values are associated with the lake, while only one value is associated with the rocky beach. The lake is likely to be much more challenging to manage, as people value it for different reasons – particularly if those reasons are incompatible - whereas they all value the rocky beach for the same reason.

These analyses and more are all described and accompanied by colorful maps in the Human Ecology Mapping Atlas for the Olympic Peninsula. In addition to the atlas, we also published two journal articles about the project. One article, “Mapping Landscape Values: Issues, Challenges and Lessons Learned from Field Work on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington” describes the different types of decisions that go into designing and implementing a human ecology mapping project. The other article, “Values Mapping and Counter-Mapping in Contested Landscapes: an Olympic Peninsula (USA) Case Study”, describes circumstances in which human ecology mapping can become a highly political process.

Phase 2 – Mapping Visitor Perceptions

The community mapping workshops yielded a wealth of data about the values and outdoor activities important to Olympic Peninsula residents. What is missing from that dataset, however, are the values and activities of the many visitors to the Peninsula. To fill this gap, a team from the PSU Geography Department obtained funding from the Mazamas, a Portland-based mountaineering club, in 2012 to do a follow-up human ecology mapping project focused primarily on visitors. Rather than organizing workshops, the team decided to go out to where the visitors were likely to be and collected data in the field. In this case, the field was very diverse: visitor centers, campgrounds, trailheads, ranger stations, and one of Washington State’s many ferries that link the Olympic Peninsula with the densely-populated Seattle metropolitan area.

The approach proved very productive: in four trips spread out over July, August, and September of 2012, the team collected 345 usable surveys, with a total of 1549 mapped locations. The team used a portfolio of spatial analysis techniques similar to those piloted in Phase 1. One new technique they used was hot spot analysis, which allowed for a more accurate assessment of where values and activities were concentrated.

Perhaps the most striking difference that the team found between visitors and residents was that visitors tended to map places within Olympic National Park, whereas residents who participated in the workshop tended to map places located in Olympic National Forest and on lands administered by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Indeed, the areas that visitors most commonly mapped corresponded to those that are listed as the top destinations in many tourist information guides: Hurricane Ridge, Lake Crescent, the Hoh Rain Forest, Rialto Beach, Lake Quinault, and Port Townsend. All of these places except Port Townsend are found in Olympic National Park.