Assessing urban recreation ecosystem services through the use of geocache visitation and preference data: a case-study from an urbanised island environment

Abstract

Recreation is an important cultural ecosystem service and is one way in which communities experience the direct and indirect benefits arising from the experiential use of their environment. The recent rise in popularity of Global Positioning System (GPS) game applications, which combine information technology with an activity that increases mobility and encourages outdoor enjoyment, provides ecosystem service practitioners with an opportunity to make use of this georeferenced data to assess recreational ecosystem services. Geocaching is one such worldwide outdoor game. It has fixed points of incursion where people can hide and look for caches. This study explores the possibility of using geocaching data as a proxy for recreational ecosystems services in the Maltese Islands. A quantitative analysis of the georeferenced caches was used together with their visit rates and number of favourite points. This was supplemented by two questionnaires that investigated the preferences and experiences of both geocache placers (n=39) and hunters (n=21). Results show that the highest number of caches were placed and searched for in urban areas and that geocaching is strongly associated with the presence and accessibility of urban green infrastructure. The number of geocachers who stated preference for ‡ ‡ © Balzan MV, Debono I. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.experiences in nature did not translate into high visit rates to sites of high conservation value (protected areas) but landscape value was significantly associated with recreational ecosystem services flow. The results presented here provide evidence that geocaching spatial data can act as an indicator for assessing and mapping recreational ecosystem services in urban environments and in cultural landscapes.

Enriching social media data allows a more robust representation of cultural ecosystem services

“…Though the position of recreation as a final service has been questioned (Haines-Young and Potschin, 2018), recreational activities provide restorative benefits (e.g. increased physical wellbeing) and are therefore generally considered a CES (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005;Milcu et al 2012;Plieninger et al 2013;King et al 2017;Balzan and Debono 2018). In this article we will focus on hiking, a recreational activity that involves walking over an extended period, typically through natural or rural areas (Mitten et al 2016).…”

“…In this article we will focus on hiking, a recreational activity that involves walking over an extended period, typically through natural or rural areas (Mitten et al 2016). We consider hiking a CES here as it can directly provide restorative benefits, however, as the benefits from recreation may also be indirect (Balzan and Debono 2018), we recognize hiking could also be considered as a pathway to other CES (King et al 2017) through co-production between human-nature interactions (Fischer and Eastwood 2016). For example, hiking may be undertaken for spiritual and religious motivations such as a pilgrimage, to experience aesthetic qualities of nature, or as a social activity with a sense of belonging (Collins-Kreiner and Kliot 2017; Wilcer et al 2019).…”

Assessing Nature-Based Recreation to Support Urban Green Infrastructure Planning in Trento (Italy)

“…In studies about nature-based recreation, these two aspects are generally dealt with alternatively. Assessments usually focus either on the actual possibility to benefit from the presence of a green space, measured through proximity and accessibility models [34,40], or on individual preferences, elicited through surveys and interviews [67,69,70] or inferred from geolocated photos, social media, and other sources of geographic information [71][72][73]. While the former type of analyses is based on rigid causal assumptions that fail to consider individual attitudes and perspectives, the latter are place-specific, with scarce possibility of generalization.…”

Recreation and terrain effect on the spatial variation of the apparent soil electrical conductivity in an urban park

“…Urban soils and vegetation are very different from natural ones due to the recreation impact (Levin et al, 2017). Recreation is an important cultural ecosystem service (Chiesura, 2004;Balzan & Debono, 2018). Urban soils are subjected to high anthropogenic influence (Scalenghe & Marsan, 2009;Yorkina et al, 2019).…”