Utilizing a crowdsourced phrasal lexicon to identify cultural ecosystem services in El Cajas National Park, Ecuador

Abstract

In recent years, social media has been widely utilized to identify cultural ecosystem services (CES) that encapsulate place-dependent non-material values, yet related studies remained in expert-based and single-word lexicons to retrieve such values. Taking online tourism reviews from TripAdvisor and Google Maps for El Cajas National Park in Ecuador as a case study, we propose a novel approach to develop a crowdsourced phrasal lexicon for eight CES. After applying the lexicon to the texts, we filtered CES-positive reviews to find that TripAdvisor showed higher CES frequencies based on greater verbosity than Google Maps, while Google Maps contained more non-English reviews to represent Spanish-speaking users. The frequency of CES showed little difference for aesthetic value, yet English reviews outperformed in describing biological and recreational values whereas Spanish reviews excelled in describing spiritual values. Cross-linguistic comparisons of frequent phrases further elaborated different expressions in describing CES. We confirmed the applicability of crowdsourced phrasal lexicon to comprehend CES with higher context, despite the limitations from tourism-inclined contents. Overall, understanding site-specific CES can enable the implementation of data-driven conservation strategies in global protected areas.