FoxHershockMappingCommunities

communities to take advantage of SIT would shape
decision making about natural resources management by
enabling communities to better and more fully participate
in and influence political processes and policies that affect
them. It was anticipated that access to SIT, for example in
the form of the ability to manipulate GIS for their own
purposes, could increase rural communities' understanding,
capacity for self-determination, and/or access to resources.
This paper represents an effort–based upon TC GIS
documents, a survey of a subset of Trinity County citizens,
and the decade-long experiences of the project codirectors–to
evaluate the degree to which enabling and
increasing rural community access to SIT can be correlated
with community capacity-building. For the purpose of this
study, community capacity is defined as an independent
variable that affects community responses to changes in
land management, where higher capacity communities are
more adaptable (FEMAT 1993, VII-45; Kusel 2001).
BACKGROUND
Along with the spread of computer technology, SIT–and in
particular GIS and GPS–emerged from university
laboratories in the1980s (Fox et al. 2003). Because of its
costs and highly technical nature, there were significant
initial (and sometimes persistent) entry barriers to using
GIS. Concerns about equity and public access to
information were raised, for example, regarding
governments' use of SIT that the majority of the public did
not understand and to which they did not have equal
access. Particular concerns were raised regarding the
prospect of already disadvantaged segments of society,
such as rural populations (Fortman et al. 1989, 44-50),
being left further behind by unequal access to SIT. One
area of relevance was natural resource management and
the degree to which forest-dependent communities would
be able to understand and participate in decisions made
using SIT about forest resources on public lands.
In the early 1990s (and even today in many cases), people
living in rural communities, local governments, service
districts, and community-based organizations did not
generally have direct access to SIT. Contracting with outside
consultants to develop maps and other SIT outputs became
the dominant model for disseminating SIT within rural
communities. However, those contracting for SIT often did
not really understand the technology, did not control the
databases, could not use the tools associated with SIT, and
were not capable of manipulating or maintaining SIT data.
Concerns about dependency led to the development of a
decentralizing and capacity-building approach based on
helping communities develop their own SIT applications
and expertise (Radke and Everett 1993). Since community
capacity can be defined as a combination of available and
applied physical, human, financial, cultural, and social
capital (Kusel 2001), such an approach to enhancing SITrelated
community capacities can be anticipated to have
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