In the past 50 years, the participation of the public in decision-making, joint problem-solving, and interactive management has increased. This growing participatory management has been categorized into five communication and public involvement levels: Informing, Consulting, Involving, Collaborating, and Empowering, which move from one-way distribution of information to the total contribution of the public in decision-making. Progression to higher levels of participatory processes is critical for a range of preferable societal outcomes, such as better distribution of resources, anti-poverty outcomes, and higher levels of resilience to survive critical situations and disasters. Our results document the growing use of landscape visualization techniques for participatory natural resource management. This rapid development of visualization techniques has led to increased effectiveness at each level of participatory planning, as evidenced by a growing number of published studies over time. We also identify specific visualization attributes that contribute to successful outcomes within each level of participation. However, we did not find proof to support the hypothesis that the increased availability of more advanced visualization techniques is driving natural resource planning and management to adopt higher levels of public participation. We, instead, postulate that an additional factor could be responsible for the apparent mismatch between the availability of increasingly advanced visualization techniques and their use in higher levels of participatory planning. Participating stakeholders’ level of competency and local knowledge may inform this apparent paradox, as higher levels may negate the need for sophisticated visualization techniques. Likewise, lower local knowledge and decision-making competencies may require these advanced techniques to engage stakeholders in the process thoroughly. We, therefore, suggest investigating participants’ competency levels before designing visualization products, which avoids unnecessary expenditure of resources while obtaining better results. Competency is a combination of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enable individuals that supports successful task performance and problem-solving regarding real-world sustainability challenges and opportunities. As one of the essential sustainability skills, systems-thinking allows the learner to think comprehensively of system dynamics at different temporal and spatial scales, enabling the learner to assess and analyze a system’s behavioral pattern through time instead of focusing on particular short-term events. Especially after 2019, when Covid-19 hit the world, we cannot think about life, our plans, the next generation, and the earth’s future as before. COVID-19 has shown us that current approaches to planning and anticipating future consequences are insufficient for our current challenges, calling for us to introduce new models for problem-solving that acknowledge linked natural, economic, and social systems. These uncertainties, challenges, and complications emphasize the necessity of enhancing and promoting key sustainability competencies, especially systems thinking, at various scales (e.g., nations, policymakers, and local communities). These competencies enable planners, the public, the local community, academics, development practitioners, and anyone who intends to understand sustainability to address environmental challenges, get a better vision of the future, and think about practical solutions. Among all these groups, local communities and indigenous people play a significant role in preserving the natural environment, moving towards more sustainable systems, and co-producing knowledge on improving our planning based on traditional ecological knowledge. Our project will enhance decision-making opportunities for tribal communities, especially younger generations, by providing clear routes to recognizing and acknowledging their identity concerning the land and their local, traditional, and cultural values. In this research, we focus on the indigenous knowledge of the Menominee Tribal community as the leading stakeholders in the Menominee tribal forest. For thousands of years, the Menominee Nation has survived by managing natural resources in the area now known as Northeast Wisconsin. Since 1856, the Menominee Nation has been in charge of sustainable timber supplies in their forests, considered one of the first sustainable forestry operations in the United States. Rooted in this long-term experience with land stewardship, both prior to and following colonization, the Sustainable Development Institute at the College of Menominee Nation has developed to articulate a holistic model of sustainable development based on the Menominee experience. This model “conceptualizes sustainable development as the process of maintaining the balance and reconciling the inherent tensions among six dimensions of sustainability: land and sovereignty; natural environment (including human beings); institutions; technology; economy; and human perception, activity, and behavior.” The results of chapters two and three of the current document indicated that landscape visualizations that are real, static, still, non-immersive, and 2D, such as realistic images and paintings, are compelling for participatory decision-making in Forestry and Sustainability studies. We employed a more complex visualization rooted in traditional forest management concerning two identified subsets of Bloom’s Taxonomy based on the information to investigate if the more complex visualization leads to better results in policy and management. We designed and used two sets of visualization: Real, Static, Still, Non-immersive, and 2D (Realistic images), besides Real, Dynamic, Interactive, Non-immersive, and 3D (Web-based game engine). Benefiting from the advantage of these techniques, we also proposed a framework to evaluate various systems thinking skills. The general results in this experiment illustrate the effectiveness of landscape visualization in better illuminating the context of the system and systematic thinking among local communities. Although individuals’ responses to various visual forms may depend on their personality and thinking style, regardless of their culture and the location they have been raised, visualization can highly affect how people think and communicate their thoughts. However, it seems practical to design visualization tools and research methods based on the audiences’ competencies, preferences, and comfort to obtain more reliable results.

My Ph.D. dissertation titled “Landscape Visualization to Improve Sustainability Competencies in Participatory Natural Resource Management” has been released with the access level of Open Access through Penn State Library. Read more here.