The relations between nature and humans are characterised by a complex web of associations people have with their surrounding landscapes. Landscapes are defined by their biogeophysical attributes and social constructions as people assign instrumental, relational, and intrinsic values to places. Unrevealing this complex web of associations and values is a fundamental goal for planners and managers to support sustainable decision making. Participatory mapping enables understanding stakeholders’ and communities’ knowledge, perceptions, values and interest about their surrounding landscape in a place-based way. Participatory mapping approaches are becoming commonly used in science and practice to engage all kinds of people in identifying the spatial dimensions of multiple landscape values in urban, rural or natural settings to support planning and management. Thus, participatory mapping aims to improve the quality of decision and policy making, and at the same time reach and give voice to all kinds of stakeholders and interest groups. Nevertheless, participatory mapping methods still have space for improvement. Besides, the implementation of participatory mapping results to guide decision making is still incipient. There are still many questions that have not been fully addressed; e.g., how to fully represent relational and intrinsic values? How to engage all the public and not only traditional stakeholders? How to balance the interest, even conflicting interest, of different stakeholders? How can we mainstream participatory mapping for management and planning? How can we better understand multiple values and interests of stakeholders using participatory mapping?
In this session we want to elaborate more on whether and how participatory mapping approaches can contribute to the understanding of human-nature relationships and the urgent need to propose solutions for our common future.
We would like to know whether and how participatory maps are used in combination with other efforts and methods. We are interested in both, stories of success and failure, in order to learn from each other’s approaches and experience. Also, combinations of approaches; participatory maps with non-participatory maps and other methods are relevant here.

Liliana Solé Figueras (1); Xavier Garcia (2); Erica Garau (3)
(1) University of Turku (UTU), (2) Institut Català de Recerca de l’Aigua (ICRA), (3) Universidad de Almería (UAL)

 
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