Abstract
Attempts at assessing the monetary value of cultural ecosystem services has proven challenging due to their non-material and non-market characteristics. Innovative methods are needed to fill this methodological gap. In this paper, a novel approach is developed for evaluating the inspirational service, one type of valuable cultural service, of a specific ecosystem embodied in published books. Taking the Weser River in Germany as an example, a breadth of evidence found in 19 books shows the strong inspiration of the river to people living around it who create plenty of literary and artistic works that represent different faces of the river, such as novels, poems, folklore and paintings. Based on the prices of these books and the estimated number of persons who have read these books, the total value of the inspirational service provided by the Weser River is calculated as 168,499 € from 1980 to 2019, leading to the annual value of 5616.63 €/year and the unit value of 0.24 €/ha/year with the water surface area of 23,123 ha and the period of 30 years. The advantages and shortcomings of this approach are discussed, and suggestions for the improvement and further research are made.
Highlights
Ecosystems provide a wide range of direct and indirect services including provisioning, regulating, and cultural services, which are important for human life, health, and well-being [1]
The evidence we found are classified into three main classes—folklore, literary works, and artistic works
The total value of the inspirational service provided by the Weser River is calculated as 168,499 €, leading to the annual value of 5616.63 €/year and the unit value of 0.24 €/ha/year with the water surface area of 23,123 ha and the period of 30 years
Summary
Ecosystems provide a wide range of direct and indirect services including provisioning, regulating, and cultural services, which are important for human life, health, and well-being [1]. Owing to non-material and non-market characteristics as well as the issue of value plurality, the assessment of CES, the monetary valuation, has proven more challenging than that of provisioning and regulating services, requiring a totally different set of tools [4,5]. Scholars have increasingly focused on the subject perceptions of tourists [11], stakeholders [12], aboriginal people [13] or local residents [14]. This approach is often combined with public participatory GIS [15,16] or geo-tagged photographs from social media [17,18]. These approaches are often time-consuming and depend highly on the reactions of participants
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