Quantifying cultural ecosystem services: Disentangling the effects of management from landscape features

Eleanor R Tew,Benno I Simmons,William J Sutherland

doi:10.1002/pan3.14

Abstract

Abstract Cultural ecosystem services are undeniably important, yet are typically neglected in land management decisions due to a suite of intractable challenges: they are highly complex, localised, and inextricably associated with landscape features. However, to incorporate the ecosystem services framework into land management, decision‐makers need the tools to disentangle the effects of land use from other factors. This is a major challenge for ecosystem services research. Forestry is a widespread land use that has considerable potential to deliver a broad range of ecosystem services, although this requires careful management planning. Additionally, modern production forestry is undergoing a period of rapid change in the face of a plethora of challenges, such as climate change and disease. To increase cultural ecosystem services delivery from forests, managers need tools to understand the implications of different management options. In this paper, we directly test how land use affects cultural ecosystem services. We use a new approach that recognises the underlying complexity of cultural ecosystem services but produces easily interpretable results that are locally relevant and directly applicable to land management. By combining participatory geographic information systems (GIS) and a novel site matching technique, we relate cultural values explicitly to land management, while accounting for the influence of landscape features. Applying this new method to a major UK forest site, we conducted a large survey to gather participatory GIS data points. We showed that land management significantly affected cultural ecosystem service values and were able to make a series of practical forest management recommendations. Notably, a greater diversity of tree species would improve cultural value, and open space is important within the forest landscape. This approach is highly flexible and can be applied to any type of landscape. It allows cultural ecosystem services to be fully integrated into land management decisions to formulate the best management strategy to maximise ecosystem service delivery. A plain language summary is available for this article.

Highlights

People derive a range of goods and benefits from ecosystem services, which are produced by processes in the natural environment (Mace, Norris, & Fitter, 2012; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005a)
We showed that land management significantly affected cultural ecosystem service values and were able to make a series of practical forest management recommendations
Human well‐being is inextricably linked to natural capital and the provision of ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005a)

Summary

Introduction

People derive a range of goods and benefits from ecosystem services, which are produced by processes in the natural environment (Mace, Norris, & Fitter, 2012; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005a). The majority of this research has focussed on provisioning and regulating services (Martínez‐Harms & Balvanera, 2012), while cultural services have been relatively neglected (Baveye, 2017; Boerema, Rebelo, Bodi, Esler, & Meire, 2016) This may be because cultural ecosystem services are widely considered to be inherently difficult to quantify (Daniel et al, 2012; Dickinson & Hobbs, 2017; Willcock, Camp, & Peh, 2017): while many ecosystem services relate to measured biophysical processes or changes (Bagstad, Semmens, Ancona, & Sherrouse, 2017; Satz et al, 2013), cultural services include intangible concepts such as aesthetic value (Daniel et al, 2012; Milcu, Hanspach, Abson, & Fischer, 2013). Despite recognition of their importance (Chan, Guerry, et al, 2012; Daniel et al, 2012), cultural ecosystem services are frequently ignored or play a minimal role in valuation exercises (Small, Munday, & Durance, 2017)

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion