ABSTRACT.—This paper explores local perception of different forest habitats in the Maya community of Solferino, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Cognitive experimental data (free recall and checklists) are combined with botanical ground-truthing exploring the agreement pattern of the informants with respect to plant composition of four different categories of vegetation found in the proximity of the community. Using the Cultural Consensus Model, this research goes beyond previous efforts to identify local conceptions of habitats. Rather than representing models of cultural knowledge assembled by the researcher, the data describe emerging cultural models based on statistical aggregates. Our term “cultural model” refers to the fact that a modal response exists across all our informants. We find a strong consensus coupled with clear gender differences indicating differential experience with the ecological habitats under exploration. Despite the differences, residents of the local habitats explored in this paper represent agreed-upon categories.