Abstract
Within the ecosystem services framework, cultural ecosystem services (CES) have rarely been applied in state-wide surveys of protected area networks. Through a review of available data and online research, we present 22 potential proxy indicators of non-material benefits people may obtain from nature in Natura sites in Greece. Despite the limitations due to data scarcity, this first distance-based study screens a recently expanded protected area system (446 Natura sites) providing steps towards an initial CES capacity review, site prioritization and data gap screening. Results identify hot spot Natura sites for CES values and wider areas of importance for the supply of CES. Additionally, a risk analysis mapping exercise explores the potential risk of conflict in the Natura sites, due to proposed wind farm developments. Α number of sites that may suffer serious degradation of CES values due to the large number of proposed wind turbines within these protected areas is identified, with 26% of Greece’s Natura sites showing serious and high risk of degradation of their aesthetic values. Screening-level survey exercises such as these may play an important role in advancing conservation effectiveness by increasing the appreciation of the multiple benefits provided by Natura protected areas. Based on this review, we propose recommendations through an adaptive approach to CES inventory and research initiatives in the protected area network.
Highlights
Many Natura sites have high cultural values and these have often been overlooked and ignored within biodiversity conservation [1]
All the wind turbines were mapped in a GIS and we explore the risk of degradation to two cultural ecosystem services (CES) categories in relation to the numbers of wind turbines proposed in each Natura scores and classification of risk mapping in Thesimple simplesummation summationofofCES
This study enabled us to: a) build for the first time a preliminary list of selected CES indicators supplied by Natura sites based on available proxies; b) assess the spatial distribution of the potential
Summary
Many Natura sites have high cultural values and these have often been overlooked and ignored within biodiversity conservation [1]. In the ecosystem services (ES) framework, the non-material benefits nature provides to humans are analyzed through cultural ecosystem services (CES) [2,3]. CES include a wide range of benefits that the natural environment provides for people; direct and indirect values pertaining to culture, heritage, education, recreation, tourism, aesthetic, religious and spiritual attributes. Various CES analyses have been utilized in many applications, including studies of landscapes and seascapes [4,5,6,7]. Few CES applications focus on protected area networks [8,9,10], and CES indicators at these broader scales, such as regional scales, are variously defined and not consistent [11,12,13,14].
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