Social media data reveals multiple cultural services along the 8.500 kilometers of Brazilian coastline

Abstract

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are benefits that people receive from ecosystems, for example, through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, recreation, and aesthetic experiences. These are important contributors to human well-being, but are challenging to measure due to their intangible nature and because they may vary spatially depending on ecosystem condition and restrictions on use. Here, we employ a big data methodology to identify CES over a large scale case study with the purpose of providing insights for marine and coastal management. First, we used machine learning to identify features present in 21,789 Flickr photographs taken across approximately 8,500 km of the Brazilian coastline. Then, we associated the keywords describing the identified features with broad CES categories allowing us to identify and map the geographical distribution of cultural services. We found that CES related to aesthetic experiences were more represented in photographs taken in protected areas, while other forms of cultural value (e.g. sport recreation, social recreation) were more frequent in unprotected areas. Notwithstanding the unavoidable biases in favour of certain CES representations, our results illustrate diverse forms of cultural services generated by the Brazilian coast. While there was a generally higher provision of CES per user in protected areas reflecting their enhanced potential to support tourism and other CES-related activities, the image classification algorithm was not able to identify CES which are less dependent on the biophysical domain such as spiritual values, inspiration, education and arts. We believe that our approach can be applied at broader scales (continental and global) in order to uncover cultural services in multiple environments while strongly recommending integration with social science based methodologies and expertise. We further advocate for the employment of such automatic evaluation at local scale as a tool to complement other approaches in support of protected area management, including resource allocation and investments to potentialize CES (i.e. recreational infrastructure, wildlife observation posts) or other relevant ecosystem services.