On How Crowdsourced Data and Landscape Organisation Metrics Can Facilitate the Mapping of Cultural Ecosystem Services: An Estonian Case Study

Artem Domnich,Stien Heremans,Mart Külvik,Oleksandr Karasov,Igor Chervanyov

doi:10.3390/land9050158

Abstract

Social media continues to grow, permanently capturing our digital footprint in the form of texts, photographs, and videos, thereby reflecting our daily lives. Therefore, recent studies are increasingly recognising passively crowdsourced geotagged photographs retrieved from location-based social media as suitable data for quantitative mapping and assessment of cultural ecosystem service (CES) flow. In this study, we attempt to improve CES mapping from geotagged photographs by combining natural language processing, i.e., topic modelling and automated machine learning classification. Our study focuses on three main groups of CESs that are abundant in outdoor social media data: landscape watching, active outdoor recreation, and wildlife watching. Moreover, by means of a comparative viewshed analysis, we compare the geographic information system- and remote sensing-based landscape organisation metrics related to landscape coherence and colour harmony. We observed the spatial distribution of CESs in Estonia and confirmed that colour harmony indices are more strongly associated with landscape watching and outdoor recreation, while landscape coherence is more associated with wildlife watching. Both CES use and values of landscape organisation indices are land cover-specific. The suggested methodology can significantly improve the state-of-the-art with regard to CES mapping from geotagged photographs, and it is therefore particularly relevant for monitoring landscape sustainability.

Highlights

Almost 50 years ago, in the 1970s, Philippe Saint-Marc interpreted the outdoor environment as a social service supporting a good quality of life and public well-being [1]
Our results are based on photographs uploaded to the social media sites, Flickr and VK.com, which can be used to represent the actual use of some cultural ecosystem service (CES), and are linked to spatial landscape indices in Estonia
Evidence from our study suggests that social media users prefer taking photographs of landscapes and outdoor activities in areas with greater colour harmony, whilst landscape coherence is linked strongly only to wildlife watching and, to a lesser extent, other CESs

Summary

Introduction

Almost 50 years ago, in the 1970s, Philippe Saint-Marc interpreted the outdoor environment as a social service supporting a good quality of life and public well-being [1]. Ever since this logic has been elaborated upon with the concept of cultural ecosystem services (CESs) [2,3] and a geographic perspective connecting the ecosystem (landscape) structure and functions with benefits and values [4]. Having a proper understanding, quantitative assessment, and an incorporation of CES into decision-making processes is considered crucial for achieving sustainable development goals and other policy targets [13,14,15,16].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion