By Sarah Greenwood, Elisa Fuentes-Montemayor, Catherine E. Cowie, James Levine, Piran White, Michael Wilson and Sandra Engstrom

Illustration of the story ‘finding a home because of trees and people’ by artist Orla Stevens

This Plain Language Summary is published in advance of the paper discussed. Please check back soon for a link to the full paper.

Forests and woodlands are important for biodiversity and climate mitigation and provide many services to people. Current policies currently aim to increase forest cover while also maximising the benefits of forests for people. However, if tree planting and forest expansion initiatives don’t properly engage with local communities whom changes in tree and forest cover effect, then the policies risk a lack of support. For effective forest and woodland expansion and creation, it is important to fully consider diverse views and to engage with people’s emotional connections to local landscapes.

 In this study we explored the use of two different methods for community engagement—storytelling and participatory mapping.  We studied this using a tree planting case in the Forth Valley area of Scotland.  In a series of workshops, we asked people to discuss the values they attach to woods and trees and what benefits they would like from local woodland expansion and creation. We then explored the main themes people discussed at each workshop type. We found that storytelling provides insights into emotional and abstract connections whereas mapping provides more practical details on local needs. We then developed an integrative approach that allowed storytelling to be combined with mapping-based discussions to gain a fuller impression of community needs in relation to woodland creation and expansion.

We propose that this combined storytelling and mapping approach can be more inclusive and can provide a more holistic understanding of the use and non-use values linking people and place.