“A Map Is Not the Territory”
Mapping, Modeling, and the Power of Place - In Conversation with GIS Analysts Jesse A. Goldstein and Stacie Wolny on How Spatial Data Shape Real-World Decisions
In 1931, mathematician Alfred Korzybski was giving a presentation on linguistic semantics when he coined the phrase, “The map is not the territory.” It is a phrase as practical as it is philosophical. Every day, we encounter maps that have been simplified by their makers for specific purposes. While we rely on maps as guides, we often forget that they are abstractions with limits rather than true representations of the complex and interwoven terrain of people, histories, landscapes, and economies they depict. Korzybski’s reminder takes on particular resonance when considering the role that maps and spatial information play in decision-making.
On one hand, maps are powerful tools, precisely because of their ability to simplify vast amounts of information for specific purposes. In the context of natural capital and ecosystem services, what was once abstract takes on an element of physicality. Maps can facilitate comparison of alternatives, weigh trade-offs, visualize new ways of understanding, and help us navigate our relationship to a landscape. Either way, maps activate the imagination. Represented in this way, data does not merely inform; it frames the relationship between one thing and another.
A map can show how a city’s drinking water depends on forest management far upstream; or pinpoint exactly where mangrove restoration might strengthen coastal resilience by reducing storm-related vulnerability and avoiding costly damage; or how economic development in one location might impose ecological, economic, or social costs for communities or ecosystems elsewhere.
At its best, a map, model, or scenario can help aggregate spatially explicit information (i.e., specific to a location), turning those abstract ecological processes into relational stories and decision-relevant data. When it comes to using spatial information in decision-making, the challenge, then, doesn’t seem to be whether to map, but how. As Korzbyski reminds us, both the natural and human worlds are rich in detail and complexity. Decisions that radiate outward from a static map can alter (for better or worse) the very “territory” they hope to represent.
This raises a central question: is it possible to balance the simplicity needed for a policy-relevant map or model with ways of working that recognize the complex interconnections between human and ecological experience?
To explore this, I sat down with two of our senior GIS analysts at the Stanford-based Natural Capital Alliance, Jesse A. Goldstein and Stacie Wolny, to learn more about their process. They are expert data analysts who routinely use (and support others in using) our open-source modeling and mapping software, InVEST.
Wolny, a matter‑of‑fact East Coaster (who moved to California many years ago) with little patience for pretense, came to ecosystem services modeling after years in what she described as “hardcore computer jobs at hardcore computer companies.” Goldstein, an avid skier and outdoor educator, arrived by way of a decade of hands-on fieldwork in remote landscapes. Both Wolny and Goldstein move easily between scales: in one breath, they describe the power of remote sensing and Earth-observation data; in the next, they dive into the specifics of a single ridge, a watershed boundary, or the effects of an eroding landscape on a local community.
It was clear in speaking with them that, while both are experts in the granularity of data crunching, they do not lose sight of the fundamentals of understanding and supporting the human relationship to land and the world. What follows is an edited excerpt of that exchange.
Q: How does your own relationship with place inform your use of GIS?
JG: Having an intimate connection to the landscape or seascape [we are analyzing] informs our ability to use GIS, and vice versa. These GIS tools are really powerful. They enable us to look at things over much broader areas in less time and synthesize or summarize ideas in a way that’s easier for us to process and draw conclusions from. But at the same time, there are some costs of separating us from that real environment. Though the map may be a static snapshot, [with] time and experience, people can learn to view each data point and understand that there’s a rich tapestry of lives and cultures and realities within that.
SW: We rarely work where we live, which is a bit tragic. One repercussion is that we sometimes have to parameterize [defining variables that reflect local conditions] our models without having seen what agriculture or forests look like in those places. We can get information online, and we always talk with partners and local experts, but it’s incredibly enlightening when we have the opportunity to walk through a watershed, hear local people describe the situation, and see how things actually work. That experience not only feels personally satisfying, it also makes for better analysis, so we try to do that as often as possible.
Q: How do you engage with communities and partners to inform these different ways of modeling work you do?
JG: It’s important that we don’t lose sight of that “old-school analog approach,” where we’re making sure we’re validating with the people who live and work in these places that what we’re considering is real for them and their experience.
[Participatory mapping is one way that we often engage communities directly. It helps us to identify the ecosystem services, beneficiaries (the people who benefit from the services), and changes over time that they have witnessed and cared about. These methods are particularly important for mapping cultural values, local knowledge, and services that are difficult to quantify using data alone.]
JG: I’m really listening to the language, the word choice they use… maybe multiple people value the same location for similar reasons, but they might describe how they take advantage of that resource differently. I’m also listening for: is that just a personal opinion, or is it a group or a certain community or a certain demographic that feels the same way about that place? Oftentimes you’ll hear them referring to family members or community members or colleagues who might also have input and you start to think about who else we should recruit and get information from.
SW: We often begin with very open-ended questions, like:
Where are the places that you do things in your life?
What are you worried about?
What are your hopes for the future?
What are your fears for the future?
And then people begin to draw things on maps that we did not know about, or wouldn’t know about necessarily from global or other data sets.
One good example is from western Belize. We did not realize how much pressure was coming [from] both over the border and internally in terms of agricultural encroachment and illegal gold mining in protected areas. But when we got there it was clearly on everybody’s mind. We did a community workshop and got these maps back, and on the maps, we were able to see [where] this concern about agricultural encroachment and gold mining was.
Then we digitized [in this case ‘digitizing’ means converting marks drawn on physical maps into digital data points for use in computer models] the community’s annotations and used that information to inform future scenario maps in our modeling. But we would not have known how important that was to people without actually listening to them talk.
Q: What is the next step after digitizing community input?
SW: In the case of Belize, we digitized the circles around the gold mining areas and the circles around the places where agriculture is encroaching. Most of our models involve using a “land use/land cover” map so that we know where the forests are, and where the agriculture is, and where the urban areas are. Often, our scenarios take the form of altering that land use map so we can envision different possibilities: what if there were more development? Or more restored forests?
I can then take that new digitized data about agricultural encroachment and add it to our land cover map. So now I have a scenario where everything else is the same, but a bunch of the forest has turned into agriculture. Then we run that through our model and compare the results to how things are now, and could be in the future, beginning to understand how that encroachment of agriculture might change our water supply or quality, or carbon storage, or whatever it is that we’re considering.
This second set of maps above shows three future scenarios that were created from the digitized community data (with a total of 25 hand-drawn maps). These scenario maps were used as inputs to several InVEST models to estimate the change in ecosystem services due to extensive agriculture, timber, or tourism expansion.
These scenarios are a typical output, where the creation of a set of land use and land cover maps includes a conservation-focused future, a development-focused future, and a middle path where development is allowed but informed by ecosystem protection and restoration. Once scenarios are created, they are analyzed using modeling or other geospatial methods, then compared with current conditions to estimate the changes in ecosystem service provisions under these different possible futures.
Another example from Belize below demonstrates how these types of exercises led to discussions about three possible futures for informing that nation’s coastal zone management plan.1
SW: This way of mapping is important because we can bring together biophysical, social, and other information. We can begin to see how they overlap, and say: here’s where people are benefiting, here’s where people are not, and who those people are. Some people understand this intuitively. When we talk with local people, they’ll say, “Yeah, those people over there are doing this,” or “They don’t have any trees on their street.” So the map becomes a tool to demonstrate this when we start talking to policymakers and decision-makers. Suddenly, they can also see this information visually and begin to understand where and who things are happening to.
Q: Historically, maps can carry a weighty history of colonialism and exclusion of people from resources. How do you see your work in relation to that history?
JG: Yeah, great question. My impression is, historically, depending on where you sit, maps have most of the time led to what I would consider negative consequences. They can be so powerful, compared to say, a data table. They’re synthesizing an enormous amount of information in a way that’s often easier for people to visualize certain relationships, like clustering and spillover effects of neighbors. But they are also massive simplifications of reality, and they involve a lot of artistic decisions.
We’re displaying data, whether quantitative, or qualitative data we collected from a community, and then we’re making choices to try to appeal to our audience. We want it to resonate with the appropriate audiences in a compelling way, but there are also certain elements of the story we’re choosing to highlight or not. That has really powerful effects. Traditionally, this has been used to displace and marginalize people by claiming land tenureship. So when I’m making maps, I’m always trying to be aware of that history. That these maps are going to be viewed by audiences that can interpret them in different ways. I want to be aware of who lives in those places. I think: what is the purpose of this map? Who is it for? Is it for some government that’s going to make a policy decision, and what are the potential effects?
Even though traditionally maps have often been leveraged for power and greed, you can flip that the other way too. They can be used to empower. [Also] we can’t expect everyone to have the same understanding about the benefits and limitations of maps the same way that Stacie and I are. That puts responsibility back on us to make sure what we’re putting out there isn’t likely to get misinterpreted or misused or leveraged in a way that can be hurtful to people or nature. But ultimately, we’re just crafting the tools, we’re not the ones wielding them. The same hammer can be used to create or destroy.
Q: Where do you find hope and purpose in your work ?
SW: I actually find it really unfortunate that the Natural Capital Alliance has to exist, because we should not have to go through everything we go through to remind people that we are utterly dependent upon the natural functioning of this planet. I take hope in the fact that everywhere I’ve been in the world, not only is it a total mess, but there also are people who are trying to do something about it.
There are people who understand the history and the culture, and are trying to find ways to reverse the tide of destruction and disconnection from our life support system. I gain some hope knowing that everywhere I’ve been, there are people who are trying to get this information into government planning policies and international development banks.
I also have hope because of the class I teach at Stanford. Everybody comes into the class understanding we are dependent on nature and asking to learn how to get this understanding into their area of study. The students are diverse, from the medical school, the business school, biologists, ecologists, and other multidisciplinary areas. People are realizing the need for incorporating nature, including educators and artists. I feel good that students are coming in with a fundamental understanding of that interdependence and the importance of turning things around. Cultivating ecological intelligence should be at the core of our entire education system.
It’s hard for students and myself to look at nature in a mechanistic, human-centric, digital point of view, especially when its value is so obvious in our lived experience. But then we also need to speak to people who only understand data, numbers, or monetary value, so then we have to go through the nitty-gritty: the data crunching, modeling, economic valuation, beneficiary analysis, and all the other jargon. It’s non-trivial to do all that. These are the weeds we have to get through in order to create the information that’s starting to change the tide within some of these organizations who have gotten really stuck in a disconnected modality.
JG: I still often get the question of whether it’s an academic exercise or more [practical], modeling ecosystem services, determining what values does nature really have?
Q: And is it? Simply an exercise?
JG: I meant this mostly rhetorically, but my motivation for mentioning it came from how surprised I often am that people are so disconnected from nature that they don’t even recognize that it has any value at all. Let alone that we’re utterly dependent upon it. A major prevailing perception remains that our lives and economy are suspended from nature or that we’ve evolved past it or engineered our way out of it. In many ways, putting values on nature is always an academic exercise to an extent, because, to me, of course nature is invaluable, priceless. But pricelessness is impractical and equates to valuelessness for most decision-makers. Thus, we work to provide convincing evidence demonstrating that nature over here [i.e., in this specific location] is worth at least this much to people over there [in some other specific location].
So, it always depends on context. We hope that our assessments and valuations are leveraged to inspire and inform decisions that lead to better outcomes for nature and people, and many of them do just that. But sometimes, they are simply published, or not even that, and they don’t influence change. And sometimes we don’t know that answer for a particular project because work can sit dormant for years before being rediscovered and used further down the road, or we’re not aware about how something we did may have impacted a policy or decision. That’s actually an area where we’re aiming to improve… monitoring and tracking the impact of our work longterm.
SW: Going back to “The map is not the territory”: that quote speaks to a lot of what we’ve been talking about. We make these maps, but the reality is much more complex. Those maps are two-dimensional, simplified, often created by analysts and scientists. When we think about maps [in the context of natural capital] we are also trying to think more about the territory under them, what’s really going on on the ground and then how future policies, climate, and development scenarios could then change it.
Verutes, G. M., Arkema, K. K., Clarke-Samuels, C., Wood, S. A., Rosenthal, A., Rosado, S., …Ruckelshaus, M. (2017). Integrated planning that safeguards ecosystems and balances multiple objectives in coastal Belize. International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management, 13(3), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/21513732.2017.1345979, Integrated Coastal Zone Management, Belize | Natural Capital Alliance