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The use of navigation applications changed the way people find their way in an unfamiliar environment. A combination of maps, images and textual route instructions shown (or with audio) on one screen guides the user to the destination but may sometimes be overwhelming. This article investigated the spatial knowledge participants acquired after being presented with different types of route instructions, human and computer-generated, in an online wayfinding task using Google Streetview (without the 2D map) of an unfamiliar environment. The results showed a significant difference in the wayfinding performance for deviations from computer-generated instructions, whilst there was no difference in the time spent and the scene recall. Sketch maps revealed both route-like and survey-like characteristics. But most sketch maps are characterised by high route-likeness. Furthermore, this study showed a significant effect of the environmental layout on the participant’s performance based on deviations incurred during wayfinding. The results of this study have implications for improving navigation system instructions and design as well as for learning with geospatial technologies.

Abstract External representations powerfully support and augment complex human behavior. When navigating, people often consult external representations to help them find the way to go, but do maps or verbal instructions improve spatial knowledge or support effective wayfinding? Here, we examine spatial knowledge with and without external representations in two studies where participants learn a complex virtual environment. In the first study, we asked participants to generate their own maps or verbal instructions, partway through learning. We found no evidence of improved spatial knowledge in a pointing task requiring participants to infer the direction between two targets, either on the same route or on different routes, and no differences between groups in accurately recreating a map of the target landmarks. However, as a methodological note, pointing was correlated with the accuracy of the maps that participants drew. In the second study, participants had access to an accurate map or set of verbal instructions that they could study while learning the layout of target landmarks. Again, we found no evidence of differentially improved spatial knowledge in the pointing task, although we did find that the map group could recreate a map of the target landmarks more accurately. However, overall improvement was high. There was evidence that the nature of improvement across all conditions was specific to initial navigation ability levels. Our findings add to a mixed literature on the role of external representations for navigation and suggest that more substantial intervention—more scaffolding, explicit training, enhanced visualization, perhaps with personalized sequencing—may be necessary to improve navigation ability.

Millions of formal and informal land rights are still undocumented worldwide and there is a need for scalable techniques to facilitate that documentation. In this context, sketch mapping based on printed high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery is being promoted as a fit-for-purpose land administration method and can be seen as a promising way to collect cadastral and land use information with the community in a rapid and cost-effective manner. The main disadvantage of paper-based mapping is the need for digitization to facilitate the integration with existing land administration information systems and the sustainable use of the data. Currently, this digitization is mostly done manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone. This article presents the SmartLandMaps approach to land rights mapping and digitization to address this gap. The recording involves the use of sketches during participatory mapping activities to delineate parcel boundaries, and the use of mobile phones to collect attribute information about spatial units and land rights holders. The digitization involves the use of photogrammetric techniques to derive a digital representation from the annotated paper maps, and the use of computer vision techniques to automate the extraction of parcel boundaries and stickers from raster maps. The approach was deployed in four scenarios across Africa, revealing its simplicity, versatility, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. It can be regarded as a scalable alternative to traditional paper-based participatory land rights mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sketch maps are considered a reliable method for assessing spatial knowledge. However, it is unknown whether all information types in sketch maps are reconstructed with similar accuracy under differing task instructions. Here, we show that the dominant information type and metric accuracy of sketches of a single environment drawn by the same person change across drawing tasks. Results are in line with the situated nature of spatial cognition: participants produce different types of maps, and different recall errors, depending on the task at hand. Understanding variation in measures of sketch maps is critical for designing standardized and automated methods of sketch map analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

External representations powerfully support and augment complex human behavior. When navigating, people often consult external representations to help them find the way to go, but do maps or verbal instructions improve spatial knowledge or support effective wayfinding? Here, we examine spatial knowledge with and without external representations in two studies where participants learn a complex virtual environment. In the first study, we asked participants to generate their own maps or verbal instructions, partway through learning. We found no evidence of improved spatial knowledge in a pointing task requiring participants to infer the direction between two targets, either on the same route or on different routes, and no differences between groups in accurately recreating a map of the target landmarks. However, as a methodological note, pointing was correlated with the accuracy of the maps that participants drew. In the second study, participants had access to an accurate map or set of verbal instructions that they could study while learning the layout of target landmarks. Again, we found no evidence of differentially improved spatial knowledge in the pointing task, although we did find that the map group could recreate a map of the target landmarks more accurately. However, overall improvement was high. There was evidence that the nature of improvement across all conditions was specific to initial navigation ability levels. Our findings add to a mixed literature on the role of external representations for navigation and suggest that more substantial intervention—more scaffolding, explicit training, enhanced visualization, perhaps with personalized sequencing—may be necessary to improve navigation ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sketch maps reveal important features that reflect people's understanding of the environment. This study presents how the different types of sketch maps highlighted shared spatial knowledge through a theory-based approach to skeletal map development. Sketch maps collected from 123 university students demonstrated that the information drawn combined sequential (streets) and spatial elements highly dominated by landmarks. Students' cognitive image of the campus is influenced by open spaces as structuring regional features. The paper illustrated a quick visualization of the spatial layout and how the shared features are described in the route instructions that may be useful during wayfinding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans tend to misrepresent spatial information which leads to systematic errors due to distorted organizational processes regarding metric and positional judgments. This study is aimed at analyzing metric and positional distortions in cognitive maps by using external representations, namely sketch maps, in two experiments with young participants. In the first experiment, we use the sketching area of Northern Europe. In the second experiment, the University campus area was used. The first aim was to test the hypothesis that the presence of the sea between the triplet of landmarks generates an overestimation of the distances between them in the case of Northern Europe; and to test the hypothesis that the number of turns in a route influences the overestimation of the distance between landmarks in the case of the campus area. The second aim was to investigate alignment and rotation errors using the same maps. Concerning metric errors, the results showed the overestimation of distances with a geographical gap between the cities (the sea in the Northern European Area), and those with more turns between landmarks (the campus area). The results concerning rotations and alignments were in line with the previous research about positional errors. The present study extended findings on distortions in spatial mental representation as emerging from verbal judgments, to sketch maps: direct visuospatial external representations eluding the conversion into verbal coding of spatial information. The presence of distortions in cognitive maps could be considered the consequence of the encoding of spatial information.

When studying wayfinding in urban environments, researchers are often interested in obtaining measures of participants' survey knowledge, i.e., their estimate of distant locations relative to other places. Previous work showed that distance estimations are consistently biased when no direct route is available to the queried target or when participants follow a detour. Here we investigated whether a corresponding bias is manifested in two other popular measures of survey knowledge: a pointing task and a sketchmapping task. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there is a systematic bias in pointing/sketchmapping performance associated with the preferred route choice in an applied urban setting. The results were mixed. We found moderate evidence for the presence of a systematic bias, but only for a subset of urban locations. When two plausible routes to the target were available, survey knowledge estimates were significantly biased in the direction of the route chosen by the participant. When only one plausible route was available, we did not find a statistically significant pattern. The results may have methodological implications for spatial cognition studies in applied urban settings that might be obtaining systematically biased survey knowledge estimates at some urban locations. Researchers should be aware that the choice of urban locations from which pointing and sketchmapping are performed might systematically distort the results, in particular when two plausible but diverging routes to the target are visible from the location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans tend to misrepresent spatial information which leads to systematic errors due to distorted organizational processes regarding metric and positional judgments. This study is aimed at analyzing metric and positional distortions in cognitive maps by using external representations, namely sketch maps, in two experiments with young participants. In the first experiment, we use the sketching area of Northern Europe. In the second experiment, the University campus area was used. The first aim was to test the hypothesis that the presence of the sea between the triplet of landmarks generates an overestimation of the distances between them in the case of Northern Europe; and to test the hypothesis that the number of turns in a route influences the overestimation of the distance between landmarks in the case of the campus area. The second aim was to investigate alignment and rotation errors using the same maps. Concerning metric errors, the results showed the overestimation of distances with a geographical gap between the cities (the sea in the Northern European Area), and those with more turns between landmarks (the campus area). The results concerning rotations and alignments were in line with the previous research about positional errors. The present study extended findings on distortions in spatial mental representation as emerging from verbal judgments, to sketch maps: direct visuospatial external representations eluding the conversion into verbal coding of spatial information. The presence of distortions in cognitive maps could be considered the consequence of the encoding of spatial information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of formal and informal land rights are still undocumented worldwide and there is a need for scalable techniques to facilitate that documentation. In this context, sketch mapping based on printed high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery is being promoted as a fit-for-purpose land administration method and can be seen as a promising way to collect cadastral and land use information with the community in a rapid and cost-effective manner. The main disadvantage of paper-based mapping is the need for digitization to facilitate the integration with existing land administration information systems and the sustainable use of the data. Currently, this digitization is mostly done manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone. This article presents the SmartLandMaps approach to land rights mapping and digitization to address this gap. The recording involves the use of sketches during participatory mapping activities to delineate parcel boundaries, and the use of mobile phones to collect attribute information about spatial units and land rights holders. The digitization involves the use of photogrammetric techniques to derive a digital representation from the annotated paper maps, and the use of computer vision techniques to automate the extraction of parcel boundaries and stickers from raster maps. The approach was deployed in four scenarios across Africa, revealing its simplicity, versatility, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. It can be regarded as a scalable alternative to traditional paper-based participatory land rights mapping.

The research presented in this paper is a segment of a broader study that examined the application of diagrams in the process of the architectural design of students. Design diaries (sketch maps) were used to record this process, and the focus of the present paper is on the role and importance of these diaries for the development of design skills of beginners in the introductory studio course. The results of the research show that design diaries enable the organization of ideas over time, which facilitates the synthesis of ideas and inspiration.

Purpose The main purpose of the paper is to define historical landscapes through locals’ perspectives and employs community mapping as a tool for defining and transferring perceived landscape elements Design/Methodology/Approach The method used in this research consists of various stages, such as determining the boundaries of the study area, determining the goals and objectives of the community mapping, evaluation of the mapping process in the examined toolkits, and the community mapping process design specific to the study area according to the toolkits reviewed in the literature, and the outputs and observations obtained from the maps. Findings As a result of the community mapping study conducted with men and women separately, items under the themes of agriculture (past and present), hydrology, tangible cultural heritage, intangible cultural heritage, built environment, connectivity, flora and fauna were identified. In this study, beyond the recognized physiographic features of the district, were discovered its “unseen” components due to the statements of locals and the analysis of the perceptual data they provided. Were acquired verbal information and point data about some archaeological sites that are not mentioned in any records or literature, as they remain undiscovered. Research Limitations/Implications This study bridged an establishing a new link with sustainable spatial planning by assessing perceptions of local people to the environment they live in. However, this study has limitations in the verbal and linear expressions of the groups participating in the mapping process.In the pre-mapping process needs to be supported by local government and non-governmental organizations for more participants. Social/Practical Implications it is suggested that the use of this methods such as spatial data production (on historical differences in landscape) within the mainframe of the participant planning approach and community mapping (to ensure collective wellbeing by creating healthy, sustainable spaces) and the inclusion of these methods in spatial planning stages will prove significantly useful. Originality/Value This study provides a framework for integrating different perspectives to better recognise and planning and manage the landscape character. This framework can be used as a foundation for a planning process in touch with “real life” and “users”.

Tourists experience events, activities, and spaces in holiday destinations. On-site perception occurs with wayfinding, cognitive mapping, and completing memorable experience. Holiday villages are destinations that meet tourists' daily recreation needs as dining, resting, and socializing. This study investigates holiday village components that impact tourist cognitive maps with sketch mapping and questionnaire techniques. The theoretical base proposes a dual-channel cognitive mapping model with personal and environmental variables for unit and route distortions on sketch maps. Cognitive mapping is affected by gender, visit repeat, sign usage, landmark usage, unit's distance to main entrance and route, route length, and route's orientation on site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing sketch maps is one of the most widely used tools for observation recording in community mapping. However, because sketches are not to scale and features are not precisely located, they are not spatially accurate. With this in mind, consider an important question. Can the use of sketch maps in a community mapping lead to an acceptable result? This article addresses this question by investigating the sketch maps drawn by children in a simulated community mapping. To make the sketches useful, they must be matched and integrated together. Although much research has been conducted about data matching in sketch maps, the integration of data extracted from sketch maps has been less considered. Therefore, this article focuses on the integration of sketch maps and proposes a solution in order to examine the maps more accurately while revising and customizing the existing matching solutions. The output of the data analysis is an integrated sketch map. The accuracy of the matching between the integrated sketch map and the data extracted from OpenStreetMap (OSM) is about 94.8%. In addition, the output contains features that are not present in the OSM data, which means that this output can be used for descriptive and geometric enrichment of metric maps. These results are the output of a simulated community mapping under some strict conditions. Therefore in a real community mapping, one can expect higher accuracy in using the proposed algorithm for matching and integration of the data in sketch maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rise in the number of flood-affected people and areas has increased the interest in new methods and concepts that account for this change. Citizens are integrated into disaster risk reduction processes through participatory approaches and can provide valuable up-to-date local knowledge. During a field study in Eberbach (Baden–Wuerttemberg, Germany) sketch maps and questionnaires were used to capture local knowledge about flooding. Based on a previous study on urban flooding in Santiago de Chile, the tools were adapted and applied to river flooding in the city of Eberbach, which is regularly flooded by the Neckar River, a major river in southwest Germany. The empirical database of the study comprises 40 participants in the study area and 40 in a control area. Half of the participants in each group are residents and half are pedestrians. Purposive sampling was used, and the questionnaires aimed to gather demographic information and explore what factors, such as property, influence the risk perception of the study participants. The results show that residents identify a larger spatial area as at risk than pedestrians, and owning property leads to higher risk awareness. The flood type influenced the choice of the base maps for the sketch maps. For river flooding, one map with an overview of the area was sufficient, while for urban flooding a second map with more details of the area also enables the marking of small streets. The information gathered can complement authoritative data such as from flood models. This participatory approach also increases the communication and trust between local governments, researchers, and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background This study analyzes individuals’ perceptions of areas exposed to coastal flooding at a local level using sketch mapping methodology. In this way, 318 individuals were surveyed in four coastal municipalities in France (Barneville-Carteret, Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer, Châtelaillon-Plage and Sainte-Anne). We assessed the disagreement between expert estimates and individuals’ perceptions of areas exposed to coastal flooding using sketch mapping indicators. We also determined the relationships between individuals’ living environments and the way they perceived the spatial extent of coastal flooding. Results Respondents were likely to under-assess the exposure of areas that are actually exposed according to expert hazard maps. Perceived distance to coastal flooding areas appeared to be a predominant factor in assessing individuals’ perceptions. Conclusions Local preventive actions could take into account the individuals’ tendency to under-estimate the areas exposed to coastal flooding. Individual perception of the spatial extent of coastal flooding appeared to be more influenced by the perceived distance of the home to exposed areas than the objective distance. It is a result that raises the question about the individuals’ understanding of hazard maps and regulatory maps. This may necessitate the improvement of the appropriation of these documents by the inhabitants by involving them more closely in the application and decision process that directly concerns.

This article investigated an outdoor wayfinding performance following absolute and relative verbal route instructions. Participants were divided into two groups. Each group received two types of instructions that started in one frame of reference and shifted to another reference frame. Results showed that participants in both groups had difficulty following the absolute instructions having significantly more stops, more deviations, and more frequent checking of route instructions. It took a long time for participants to finish the task when a shift to an absolute frame of reference was made. Concerning sketch maps, participants recalled more landmarks with relative route instructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive Map Theory predicts that the hippocampus (HPC) plays a specialized, time-invariant role in supporting allocentric spatial memory, while Standard Consolidation Theory makes the competing prediction that the HPC plays a time-limited role, with more remote memories gaining independence of HPC function. These theories, however, are largely informed by the results of laboratory-based tests that are unlikely to simulate the demands of representing real-world environments in humans. Validation of these theories is further limited by an overall focus on spatial memory of newly encountered environments and on individuals with extensive lesions to the HPC and to surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions. The current study incorporates naturalistic tests of spatial memory based on recently and remotely encountered environments navigated by individuals with lesions to the HPC/MTL or that are limited to the HPC's major output, the fornix. Four participants with bilateral HPC/MTL and/or fornix lesions drew sketch maps of recently and remotely experienced neighbourhoods and houses. Tests of the appearance, distances, and routes between landmarks from the same real-world environments were also administered. Performance on the tasks was compared to that of control participants closely matched in terms of exposure to the same neighbourhoods and home environments as well as to actual maps. The performance of individuals with fornix/MTL lesions was found to be largely comparable to that of controls on objective tests of spatial memory, other than one case who was impaired on remote and recent conditions for several tasks. The nature of deficits in recent and remote spatial memory were further revealed on house floorplan drawings, which contained spatial distortions, room/structure transpositions, and omissions, and on neighbourhood sketch maps, which were intact in terms of overall layout but sparse in details such as landmarks. Lab-based tests of spatial memory of newly learned environments are unlikely to fully capture patterns of spared and impaired representations of real-world environments (e.g., peripheral features, configurations). Naturalistic tasks, including generative drawing tasks, indicate that contrary to Cognitive Map Theory, neither HPC nor MTL are critical for allocentric gross representations of large-scale environments. Conversely, the HPC appears critical for representing detailed spatial information of local naturalistic environments and environmental objects regardless of the age of the memory, contrary to Standard Consolidation Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of including a contextual underpinning to the spatial analysis of social data is gaining traction in the spatial science community. The challenge, though, is how to capture these data in a rigorous manner that is translational. One method that has shown promise in achieving this aim is the spatial video geonarrative (SVG), and in this paper we pose questions that advance the science of geonarratives through a case study of criminal ex-offenders. Eleven ex-offenders provided sketch maps and SVGs identifying high-crime areas of their community. Wordmapper software was used to map and classify the SVG content; its spatial filter extension was used for hot spot mapping with statistical significance tested using Monte Carlo simulations. Then, each subject's sketch map and SVG were compared. Results reveal that SVGs consistently produce finer spatial-scale data and more locations of relevance than the sketch maps. SVGs also provide explanation of spatial-temporal processes and causal mechanisms linked to specific places, which are not evident in the sketch maps. SVG can be a rigorous translational method for collecting data on the geographic context of many phenomena. Therefore, this paper makes an important advance in understanding how environmentally immersive methods contribute to the understanding of geographic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From geographical point of view, the farms are organic parts of the rural territories. Their situation is double-faced, they are vulnerable because of their size and production capacity; but their opportunities in value creation based on local resources and leisure capacity can be transformed into advantages. The research aim was to have actual information about farms (abandoned level, infrastructure, farm types, development, European aid use, future prospects) and discover the mental cognition about farms through sketch maps made by the focus groups. Four focus groups (people living on farms, agriculture related people, and not related people subdivided to: rural and urban population) were involved. The differences of cognition can be observed on the drawings (elaboration, number of objects, and their relative location). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on spatial cognition have rarely adopted a behaviorally objective approach for survey representations that may capture the Euclidean qualities of configurations. The current study integrates subjectively conventional coding and a recently developed objective Gardony Map Drawing Analyzer (GMDA) technique to link landmark and survey representations. The combined approach is able to present a more complete story. Participants were instructed to tour a real aquatic environment, which provided more ecologically valid results. Conventional analysis results revealed that the top two most commonly recalled and located landscape categories were lakes and a cascade due to their embedded sociopsychological meanings and physical salience. GMDA results provided quantitative measures regarding configurational outputs, angle accuracy, and distance accuracy. Based on these results, relative contributions of different measures to spatial knowledge were identified using the k-means method. From the two approaches, the results indicated that participants who were better at landmark recall led to a better global perspective of the research site. The study also points out that missing landmarks, which involve participants' loss of components in response to the target environment map, play critical roles in understanding configurations. In addition, directional information is more important than distance information in constructing spatial representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the importance of landmarks for human navigation and for orientation is well accepted, most of today's navigation systems hardly incorporate any landmark information or information supporting orientation. Different from previous research that only addressed turn-by-turn instructions in verbal forms and landmarks at decision points, the present study provides empirical evidence that human-generated wayfinding instructions are not solely turn-by-turn but the majority of instructions provide orientation information. We propose a new classification scheme for identifying information in wayfinding instructions that will not only support orientation but also facilitate construction of mental map. We explored and compared two forms of representations-visual sketch map and verbal instructions. Results revealed that landmark information is important in human wayfinding instructions with particular importance of local landmarks along the route and global landmarks that support orientation. In addition, sketch maps contained more global landmarks than verbal instructions. In contrast to turn-by-turn navigation, we found that many instructions in human route descriptions do not always refer to turning actions but to orientation. We conducted interviews with a set of raters on what they consider helpful information in both forms of representations. These results confirmed our findings and supported that future route descriptions can be more meaningful and helpful when they are enriched with orientation information as they conform to how humans structure wayfinding instructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analisamos o procedimento de coleta e processamento de informações sobre uso e cobertura da terra, obtidas por desenhos feitos com moradores de lotes rurais, em um segmento da Rodovia Transamazônica, no Pará. Consideramos as peculiaridades dos dados de campo buscando integrá-los aos dados obtidos por satélite. Concluímos que o instrumento deve ser usado sistematicamente no aprimoramento de abordagens interdisciplinares para o estudo de mudanças ambientais.We analyzed the procedure of collecting and processing information in regard to land use and land coverage obtained from sketch maps created together with rural property owners in a settlement area along the Transamazonica, the Transamazon Highway, in Pará, Brazil. We assessed the special features of field data and integrated them with data from satellites. We concluded that these sketch maps can be used systematically to improve interdisciplinary approaches in the study of environmental changes.

Sketch maps are effective tools for assessing spatial memory. However, despite their widespread use in cognitive science research, sketch map analysis techniques remain unstandardized and carry limitations. In the present article, we present the Gardony Map Drawing Analyzer (GMDA), an open-source software package for sketch map analysis. GMDA combines novel and established analysis techniques into a graphical user interface that permits rapid computational sketch map analysis. GMDA calculates GMDA-unique measures based on pairwise comparisons between landmarks, as well as bidimensional regression parameters (Friedman & Kohler, ), which together reflect sketch map quality at two levels: configural and individual landmark. The configural measures assess the overall landmark configuration and provide a whole-map analysis. Individual landmark measures, introduced in GMDA, assess individual landmark placement and indicate how individual landmarks contribute to the configural scores. Together, these measures provide a more complete psychometric picture of sketch map analysis, allowing for comparisons between sketch maps and between landmarks. The calculated measures reflect specific and cognitively relevant aspects of interlandmark spatial relationships, including distance and angular representation. GMDA supports complex environments (up to 48 landmarks) and two software modes that capture aspects of maps not addressed by existing techniques, such as landmark size and shape variation and interlandmark containment relationships. We describe the software and its operation and present a formal specification of calculation procedures for its unique measures. We then validate the software by demonstrating the capabilities and reliability of its measures using simulation and experimental data. The most recent version of GMDA is available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invasive species pose global biological and economic challenges. Over the past four decades, Prosopis taxa have emerged as a major invader of the arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Prosopis juliflora , one of the highly invasive Prosopis species, is dominantly present in the Afar region of Ethiopia and continues to spread into the surrounding areas. The objective of this study was to aid the mapping, utilization, and management of the invasive P . juliflora in Afar, by employing participatory research techniques. We assessed the introduction history, impacts, uses, and control strategies of invasive P . juliflora by interviewing 108 pastoralists and agro-pastoralists. In addition, we used Participatory Mapping (PM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS), and remote sensing technologies and approaches to map sites invaded by P . juliflora . Sketch maps were produced by men, women, pastoralist and agro-pastoralist groups. Experts aggregated, scaled and reproduced the sketch maps with support from the Afar communities. We provided GPS and GIS trainings to selected community members who assisted us in collecting the GPS locations of more than 70 key features and landmarks. The sketch maps were digitized and geo-referenced by experts using the 70 GPS records as control points. Geo-referenced community maps were superimposed on pan-sharpened Landsat 8 satellite images and presented to the communities for verification. We overlaid the verified community maps on ancillary land-cover layers, and detected the land-cover classes that were most affected by P . juliflora invasion. Despite its uses as source of fire wood, charcoal, and animal fodder, the species has adverse impacts on native species and livestock resources. Afar communities mapped P . juliflora infestations, particularly those that occurred near their villages, using high and moderate density classes. The two highly invaded land-cover categories were dense grassland, and exposed sand & soils. Participants collaborated in creating the produced maps, suggesting that participatory research approaches are another tool for early detection of invasive species and guiding fine-scale management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory mapping of local land use as the basis for planning and decision-making has become widespread around the globe. However, still relatively little is known about the conceptual underpinnings of geographic information produced through participatory mapping in given cultural and linguistic settings. In this paper, we therefore address the seemingly simple question of what is (not) represented on maps through an exploratory case study comparing land use categories participants represented on sketch maps with categories elicited through more language-focused ethnographic fieldwork. To explore landscape categorization, we conducted sketch mapping with 29 participants and in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with 19 participants from the Takana indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon. Sketch mapping resulted in 74 different feature types, while we elicited 156 landscape categories used in language, of which only 23 overlapped with feature types from the sketch mapping. Vegetation categories were highly diversified in language but seldom represented on maps, while more obviously anthropogenic features were represented on sketch maps. Furthermore, participants seldom drew culturally important landscape categories such as fallow plots or important plant harvesting sites on maps, with important potential consequences for natural resource management.

Sketch maps are one of the most commonly used instruments to study people's perception of the environment. While previous research has focused on analyzing sketch maps with respect to their accuracy, completeness, or distortion, there is little study focusing on generalization (the level of geometric details of the depicted features) in sketch maps. Furthermore, when investigating people's mental representations of space, researchers compute the accuracy or completeness of sketch maps via a one-to-one comparison of sketched features with features in metric map data. The task of one-to-one comparison becomes problematic because features in sketch map often represent many features in a metric map. This paper identifies the frequently occurring generalizations in 108 sketch maps of small urban area by manually extracting generalized features such as streets and buildings and classifying them based on similarities. We found three generalization types in streets, two in junctions and four in buildings. To evaluate our classification, we created 10 sketch maps by systematically introducing the nine identified generalizations. A study was conducted wherein five raters were briefed about the different generalization types. Each of them classified the features in sketch maps as generalized and non-generalized. We found a high inter-rater agreement, implying the comprehensibility and clarity of the identified generalization types. We propose that such systematic view on the generalization in sketch maps would standardize the process of comparing them with metric map data as well as enable a new way of analyzing sketch maps with respect to generalization. • Systematic investigation and classification of generalizations in sketch map. • Enables new way of analyzing sketch map with respect to generalization. • Enables aligning sketch and metric maps with different degree of generalization. • Structured process of capturing generalization enables mental map assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how subfields within translation studies have been defined and how research interests and foci have shifted over the years, using data from the Translation Studies Abstracts (TSA) online database. We draw on the notions of ‘landscape’ and ‘sketch maps’ in an attempt to reflect on the role that TSA editors, as well as writers of papers and abstracts, have had on the dynamics of the field. We start by offering an overview of the contents of the database, and reflect on how bibliographical tools ultimately represent partial views of a disciplinary landscape. We look at how different bibliographies devise categories for describing topics of research and thus create maps to navigate that landscape. However, maps are static devices, unable to represent how the landscape was shaped historically. Thus, we also use a TSA corpus to observe how classifications and the frequencies of keywords have changed at different points in time, while reflecting on how, as inhabitants of this landscape, editors of bibliographies affect the extent to which the data is both representative of and informed by the field, and as colonizers, they impose their order upon it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cross-border cooperation to promote economic development and political integration has been among the EU's key themes since the 1990s, and contemporary policy networks are considered useful organisational solutions. Focusing on transport policies in the border regions of Basel and Luxembourg, we analyse the persistency of national preferences among policy actors, mapping their perceived 'policy spaces of action' and conceptualising these policy spaces as relational. We discuss that the networks' various actors on either side of the border appear to perceive the actual 'policy spaces' very differently. Therefore, and due to the networks' terminability, these policy spaces are highly contested and frequently negotiated between the actors. Based on a combination of in-depth interviews, sketch maps, and social network analysis, we show that large spatiocultural differences still prevail among network actors, potentially impacting on the decisions taken in cross-border policy networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the hypothesis that a route's memorability is dependent on the frequency with which people are exposed to visual landmarks. Undergraduates learned either a route through an urban area lacking visually salient features, or a route in a neighborhood with many shops and urban objects. They were then asked to recall the learned route in the form of route directions and sketch maps. The results showed higher recall performance for the richer environment. When presented with photographs depicting scenes along the route, participants exposed to the richer environment had higher recognition scores and shorter response times than the others. The data confirm the functional role of landmarks in route memory and wayfinding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mental and sketch maps have a long tradition in modern geography. Little theoretical and methodological distinction has been made, however, between different hand mapping approaches. Mental maps emerged from behavioral geography of the spatial science tradition as a technique to understand human behaviors based on peoples’ perceptions of their spatial environment. More recently, sketch maps have been used in participatory and qualitative geographic information systems (QGIS) to develop cartographies of group and individual spatial narratives. They are a tool that helps achieve QGIS's objectives of collecting unique spatial data of individual experiences, visualizing socio-spatial processes, breaking down particular barriers of positionality in research, and developing new uses of GIS. Two case studies illustrate the use of sketch maps in research, including a project examining job accessibility among working poor individuals and a study of the experiences of fear and safety in public spaces among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community members. Sketch maps in QGIS have many methodological merits. They add an invaluable dimension to the qualitative interview process, offer countermapping perspectives, generate detailed spatial information of individuals, and facilitate data interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]