Rural places are important centers of environmental and social transformation. Landholders are not only affected by socio-environmental changes, but they are influencing futures related to climate change, food security, freshwater, biodiversity, and social and economic development. Much environmental land use work understands individual landholders as rational actors, portrayed through the economic lens of “producer.” These approaches generally focus on present capacities and limitations as the principal factors contributing to land use, and the individual farm as the reference unit for decisions. Our research takes steps to expand conceptualizations of rural landholders as active and knowledgeable in envisioning, managing, and shaping environmental futures. We design and test a new approach using ecological mental maps and future imaginaries to understand land use practices through a case study in the cocoa-producing and Atlantic Forest region of Southern Bahia, Brazil. The integrated socio-perceptual (ISP) approach combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to honor the depth of landholders’ experiences and perspectives and to allow broader regional relationships and insights to emerge. We demonstrate that the ISP approach—through 49 surveys—has the capacity to capture variation and identify patterns in ecological mental maps and future imaginaries in a population, approximate the relevant spatial scales underlying these factors, and identify relationships between these and land uses. In this context, the types of narratives landholders hold about the region’s future are associated with current forest land use on their properties. We discuss potential applications of the ISP approach for land use study and practice.

农村地区是环境和社会转型的重要中心。土地所有者不仅受到社会环境变化的影响，而且还影响与气候变化，粮食安全，淡水，生物多样性以及社会和经济发展有关的未来。通过“生产者”的经济视角来描述，许多环境土地使用工作将单个土地所有者理解为理性行为者。这些方法通常着眼于当前的能力和局限性，这是导致土地使用的主要因素，而个体农场则是决策的参考单位。我们的研究采取措施扩展农村土地所有者的概念，使其在设想，管理和塑造环境未来方面具有积极性和知识。我们通过在巴西巴伊亚州南部可可生产和大西洋森林地区的案例研究，使用生态思维导图和未来的假想来设计和测试一种新方法，以了解土地使用实践。整合的社会知觉（ISP）方法结合了定性和定量方法，以尊重土地所有者的经验和观点，并允许出现更广泛的区域关系和见解。我们证明，通过49次调查，ISP方法具有捕获变化并识别人口生态思维图和未来想象中的模式，近似于这些因素背后的相关空间尺度，以及识别这些因素与土地利用之间的关系的能力。在这种情况下，土地所有者关于该地区未来的叙述类型与当前林地使用的土地属性有关。我们讨论了ISP方法在土地使用研究和实践中的潜在应用。