Cognitive Mapping of Forest Fragments
Résumé
The analysis of spatial cognition (i.e., people's ability to locate sites in the geographic space) can help land planning and forest management by predicting the behavior and reactions of people towards specific landscapes. To achieve this goal, it is of utmost importance to design robust, replicable methods; this is the purpose of this study. Here we develop a method which compares locations of an objective set of points (e.g. extracted from topographic maps) with locations of a homolog subjective set of points (e.g. collected by means of interviews and sketch maps) using a bi-dimensional regression analysis. After explaining the methodological flow, we demonstrate the applicability of the method to the assessment of spatial cognition of forest fragments in a 25 km2 agricultural landscape of northern France. \textcopyright 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.