Linking thoughts to flows - Fuzzy cognitive mapping as tool for integrated landscape modeling

This paper presents the results of six European case studies conducted in the frame of ALTER-Net, which all employed fuzzy cognitive mapping in the context of analyzing driving forces and impact of regional environmental change. Fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) is a soft systems methodology for analyzing and depicting human perceptions of a given system. It is a procedure to involve stakeholders in a research or management processes and a method to extract and analyze different kinds of knowledge about complex systems and their functioning. It describes the system by showing the central factors and their causal relations, represented by weighted arrows, as a directed graph.