Assessment of the social values of ecosystem services based on SolVES model: A case study of Wusong Paotaiwan Wetland Forest Park, Shanghai, China.

Abstract

Human demand for various ecosystem services continues to increase. The previous studies focused mainly on using economic methods to assess ecosystem service values, but few studies took social attributes and spatial heterogeneity into consideration. In this paper, we selected Wusong Paotaiwan Wetland Forest Park in Shanghai as the study area, and used Social Values for Ecosystem services (SolVES) model to assess the social values of several ecosystem services, such as aesthetic, biodiversity, cultural, recreation, etc. The results showed that the "hotspots" were situated in the places which were close to the water landscape with a broad vision such as the lawn park, Wusong Fort memorial square and waterfront observation deck. Aesthetic, historic, biodiversity, cultural, recreation and therapeutic values were the visitors' preference values. Visitors' prefe-rences could be influenced by the water landscape and the roads significantly. The value indexes of aesthetic, biodiversity, recreation and therapeutics had a significant negative correlation with the distance to water (DTW) and the value indexes of aesthetic and therapeutics had a significant negative correlation with the distance to roads (DTR). Visit frequency could influence visitors' attitudes and preferences towards biodiversity and therapeutics. SolVES had the potential to explicitly assess the social values of ecosystem services at a small scale.