摘要：The Palouse region of southeastern Washington State and an adjacent portion of northernIdaho is a working landscape dominated by agricultural production, with less than 1% of the originalbunchgrass prairie remaining. Government agencies and conservation groups have begun efforts to conservePalouse prairie remnants, but they lack critical information about attitudes and perceptions among locallandowners toward biological conservation. Knowledge about the location and condition of nativebiological communities also remains sparse. Using a bioregional approach, we integrated data collectedthrough biological surveys and social interviews to investigate relationships between biologically andsocially meaningful aspects of the landscape. We combined GIS layers of participant-identified meaningfulplaces with maps of native biological communities to identify the overlap between these data sets. We usedthese maps and interview narratives to interpret how stakeholder perceptions of the landscape correspondedwith patterns of native biodiversity. We found several prominent landscape features on the Palouse thatsupported diverse biological communities and were important to stakeholders for multiple reasons. Theseplaces may be expedient focal points for conservation efforts. However, the many small prairie remnantson the Palouse, although ecologically important, were mostly unidentified by participants in this study andthus warrant a different conservation approach. These findings will assist government agencies andconservation groups in crafting conservation strategies that consider stakeholder perceptions and theirconnection with the Palouse landscape. This study also demonstrates how GIS tools can link biologicaland social data sets to aid conservation efforts on private land
