Evaluation of a Structure Providing Cultural Ecosystem Services in Forest Recreation: Quantitative Text Analysis of Essays by Participants

Abstract

Cultural ecosystem services are nonmaterial benefits that individuals acquire from the ecosystem, such as recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, and tourism. The quantification of cultural services is considered difficult to accurately make compared to other forest ecosystem services. Although some studies evaluate cultural services from forest recreation, “simple quantification” based on easy-to-obtain data is criticized for disregarding the local context and missing essential details. Therefore, this study evaluates a structure providing cultural services, and the local or detailed factors missed by simple quantification, while illustrating objective and statistical evidence with careful observations and a comprehension of local society. This study focuses on urban resident participation in natural resource management through recreational activities in Japanese mountain villages, using Fujiwara District, Minakami Town, Japan, as a case study, and by conducting a quantitative text analysis of 424 essays containing participants’ experiences and impressions. Using the software KH Coder, the Jaccard index is used to calculate co-occurrence relationships between frequently used words, visualizing the results in a network diagram. Additionally, several codes are added to keywords that characterize this case, and correlations between each code are examined. From the analysis, we discovered that social factors, such as interaction with comrades and locals, considerably influence participants’ positive emotions.

Exploring National Park Visitors’ Judgements from Social Media: The Case Study of Plitvice Lakes National Park

“…The elaborations were carried out using KH Coder 3 software [25,39,54,55]. The KH Coder software combines two fundamental approaches of computer-based text analysis: the correlational approach, which consists in automatically extracting words from a text and analyzing them statistically; and the dictionary-based approach, which establishes coding rules for the different elements that form the text (e.g., sentences or groups of words) [55]. In order to identify the clusters of words, the Ward's minimum variance method or Ward's hierarchical clustering method was applied, as previously carried out by Barbierato et al [39].…”

Changes in Social Media Big Data on Healing Forests: A Time-Series Analysis on the Use Behavior of Healing Forests before and after the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Korea

“…Ref. [27] identified factors that positively influence the provision of cultural ecosystem services through the essays of recreational activity participants in a mountain village in Japan. Other studies have provided analyses of consumer intention and demand for forest products [28,29].…”

Identifying Cultural Ecosystem Services and Relevant Landscape Elements Provided by Urban Green Space throughout History from an Information Communication Perspective

“…In addition to the widely used interview and questionnaire methods, the document and social-media-based methods have also received increased attention [13]. Photographs [14,15] and comments [16,17] publicly published on online social media platforms, historical sources such as books and poetry [18,19], transcripts of community interviews [20,21], and even the number of occurrences of symbolic species in areas such as advertising and shop names [22] have all been used in CES identification. This is because these information carriers record both landscape characteristics and stakeholder perceptions of information services.…”