Case Study · Salish Community
Mapping Barriers, Impacts, and Lost Use
Loss of Opportunities Mapping Project – A Straits Salish Community
A Straits Salish community needed analytical and communication tools to support participation in increasingly frequent and complex assessment and planning processes across its territory. Trailmark worked with the community to create defensible, place-based outputs that describe cumulative impacts, barriers, and loss of use in ways that can be used externally without losing internal context, meaning, or control.
The project combined community surveys, knowledge holder interviews, past oral histories, existing interview records, historical maps, archaeological information, archival field notes, land tenure records, orthographic photos, and contemporary environmental datasets. Trailmark aggregated these sources into a structured data repository within the community’s Trailmark system, linking mapped features to interview recordings, transcripts, source materials, and supporting evidence.
This work produced both spatial products and a rich, reusable knowledge base. The resulting maps help communicate where access, use, and opportunity have been reduced or lost over time across land, marine, and intertidal areas, while the underlying repository supports ongoing analysis, updates, future assessments, and community-led decision-making.