Integrating cultural dimensions into the ecosystem service framework is essential for appraising non-material benefits stemming from different human-environment interactions.This study investigates how the actual provision of cultural services is distributed across the landscape according to spatially varying relationships. The final aim was to analyse how landscape settings are associated to people's preferences and perceptions related to cultural ecosystem services in mountain landscapes. We demonstrated a spatially explicit method based on geo-tagged images from popular social media to assess revealed preferences. A spatially weighted regression showed that specific variables correspond to prominent drivers
Accepted to Ecological Indicators (Dec 2015)2 of cultural ecosystem services at the local scale. The results of this explanatory approach can be used to integrate the cultural service dimension into land planning by taking into account specific benefiting areas and by setting priorities on the ecosystems and landscape characteristics which affect the service supply. We finally concluded that the use of crowdsourced data allows identifying spatial patterns of cultural ecosystem service preferences and their association with landscape settings.Keywords: non-material ecosystem benefits; cultural service preferences; social perceptions; photoseries analysis; spatially varying relationships; land use planning; recreational choice.
Highlights Revealed preferences of ecosystem service can be acquired from online platforms Spatially varying relationships were analysed trough a geographically weighted regression Environmental and opportunity settings are locally related to cultural services Habitat, accessibility, and view-points have a major impact on the service supply Spatial statistical models can be used to identify priority for land use planning
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.