The places in which people live and spend time are steeped in history, memory, and meaning from the intersection of daily life, environmental interactions, cultural practices, and ritual. Geologic features, plants, animals, and ecosystems merge with these cultural histories, forming critical parts of the landscape and areas of “high cultural salience,” or “cultural keystone places” (CKPs). We identify Kumqaq’ (Point Conception) and the surrounding area in California as a Chumash CKP. Ethnohistoric accounts and contemporary Chumash community members have long demonstrated the importance of Point Conception in Chumash worldview and identity, whereas biologists, ecologists, and conservationists reference the area's rich biodiversity and significance as a biogeographical boundary. Recent archaeological survey of the coastline surrounding Kumqaq’ highlights these connections, identifying over 50 archaeological sites—including shell middens, villages, lithic scatters, and rock art—with at least 9,000 years of occupation. Ongoing collaborations among archaeologists, the Nature Conservancy, and Chumash community members help document and understand the long-term linkages between cultural and biological diversity and how integrating these perspectives can help ensure the resilience of this nexus of human and natural history in the Anthropocene future.

Reducing race disparities in breastfeeding has become a health objective in the United States, spurring research aimed to identify causes and consequences of disparate rates. This study uses critical discourse analysis to assess how Black women are constructed in 80 quantitative health science research articles on breastfeeding disparities in the United States. Our analysis is grounded in critical race and intersectionality scholarship, which argues that researchers often incorrectly treat race and its intersections as causal mechanisms. Our findings reveal two distinct representations. Most commonly, race, gender, and their intersection are portrayed as essential characteristics of individuals. Black women are portrayed as a fixed category, possessing characteristics that inhibit breastfeeding; policy implications focus on modifying Black women’s characteristics to increase breastfeeding. Less commonly, Black women are portrayed as a diverse group who occupy a social position in society resulting from similar social and material conditions, seeking to identify factors that facilitate or inhibit breastfeeding. Policy implications emphasize mitigating structural barriers that disproportionately impact some Black women. We contribute to existing knowledge by demonstrating how dominant health science approaches provide evidence for health promotion campaigns that are unlikely to reduce health disparities and may do more harm than good to Black women. We also demonstrate the existence of a problematic knowledge set about Black women’s reproductive and infant feeding practices that is both ahistorical and decontextualized.

Our applied case study demonstrates how knowledge from community stakeholders about emotional attachment (as a key component of sense of place) can inform and influence future coastal restoration priorities at various scales in the Indian River Lagoon, Florida (USA). We map aggregate measures of emotional attachment from community stakeholders using Geographic Information Systems. We then analyze this human systems level data with kernel density estimation measures at the broader lagoon scale and with inverse distance weighted measures at more localized scales. By connecting these mapped results back to the primary reasons that participants provided for having high or low emotional attachment in a location, we show how varying spatial patterns of emotional attachment as a primary component of sense of place within and across broader geographic regions can be represented, mapped, and visualized to enhance future restoration priorities. We demonstrate how aggregate results gained from community stakeholders can help restoration teams prioritize their science communication and education strategies to align human systems level data with natural systems level data.

This community‐based research aims to enhance local‐level flood management by utilising participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) methods to capture the spatial dimensions of community member flooding concerns in Hopkins Village, Belize. We offer a mixed methodology, applying participatory sketch mapping as a way to collect local knowledge about community perceptions of flooding in this data‐scarce context. We combine this local knowledge with quantitative geostatistical hot spot analysis of basic village infrastructure characteristics to reveal insights about community perceptions of and response to flood risk. The significance of this research lies in the application of PGIS methods to create two different primary datasets, which when analysed together offer a more complete story about community understanding and needs for flood management. One set of data (more qualitative in nature) originated from sketch maps with community members and answers descriptive questions about how people spatially conceptualise hydro‐meteorological hazards within their community. The other (more quantitative in nature) is the village's first publicly accessible infrastructure dataset (including information on building structures, roads, and drainage infrastructure) digitised by our research team from high‐resolution drone imagery. Attributes for the infrastructure dataset were developed in collaboration with community members to reflect their desires for data and information suited to conduct flood vulnerability assessment. Application of thematic coding and hot spot analysis to the data reveals concerns about hazards within their community and the measures they have taken to protect themselves in the absence of resources to develop community‐wide mitigation plans. Our work offers contributions to the participatory GIS literature by providing an example of sketch mapping methods to facilitate multi‐level management of community‐level flood risk in a data‐scarce setting, and demonstrating the multiple benefits of applied participatory GIS methods as a means of overcoming data scarcity.