Abstract
Cultural ecosystem services are defined by people’s perception of the environment, which make them hard to quantify systematically. Methods to describe cultural benefits from ecosystems typically include resource-demanding survey techniques, which are not suitable to assess cultural ecosystem services for large areas. In this paper we explore a method to quantify cultural benefits through the enjoyment of natured-based tourism, by assessing the potential tourism attractiveness of species for each protected area in Africa using the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. We use the number of pictures of wildlife posted on a photo sharing website as a proxy for charisma, popularity, and ease of observation, as these factors combined are assumed to determine how attractive species are for the global wildlife tourist. Based on photo counts of 2473 African animals and plants, species that seem most attractive to nature-based tourism are the Lion, African Elephant and Leopard. Combining the photo counts with species range data, African protected areas with the highest potential to attract wildlife tourists based on attractive species occurrence were Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, Mukogodo Forest Reserve located just north of Mount Kenya, and Addo Elephant National Park in South-Africa. The proposed method requires only three data sources which are freely accessible and available online, which could make the proposed index tractable for large scale quantitative ecosystem service assessments. The index directly links species presence to the tourism potential of protected areas, making the connection between nature and human benefits explicit, but excludes other important contributing factors for tourism, such as accessibility and safety. This social media based index provides a broad understanding of those species that are popular globally; in many cases these are not the species of highest conservation concern.
Highlights
Spatial assessments of ecosystem services (ES), aiming to support management of our natural environment, are increasingly common in science (e.g., [1, 2]) and in different realms of decision making [3,4,5]
For example the Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), a common water bird in towns and cities with a range of occurrence extending to Africa, has 10 times as many posted images compared to the rare and threatened African Wild Dog (Lycaon pictus). To correct for these species which are unlikely to contribute to any tourism potential, we explored a number of different approaches: correcting for the total species range area; correcting for the number of Protected areas (PA) that the species occurs in, and using the IUCN Red List status categories to remove all species that are classified as ‘Least Concern’ for conservation
Intersecting the selected IUCN Red List species range data with the location of the African PAs resulted in a list of 2473 species that are assumed to occur within these PAs
Summary
Spatial assessments of ecosystem services (ES), aiming to support management of our natural environment, are increasingly common in science (e.g., [1, 2]) and in different realms of decision making [3,4,5]. Despite the overall progress in mapping, valuing and using information on ES for decision making, the assessments of non-material cultural benefits, such as experiences and cognitive development, that result from human-ecosystem relationships, have received little attention even though there is a growing demand for these services [6,7,8,9,10]. This is caused by the many challenges scientists encounter when assessing and locating cultural services, as these depend more than other ES on subjective stakeholder perceptions and values. Large scale assessments at a cross-county or global level have used proxies of ecosystem characteristics to estimate provided cultural ES (e.g., [14, 15])
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