Geodiversity Supports Cultural Ecosystem Services: an Assessment Using Social Media

Abstract

Geodiversity is under threat from both anthropogenic activities and environmental change which therefore requires active management in the form of geoconservation to minimise future damage. As research on the role of geodiversity on ecosystem service (ES) provision has been limited, there is a need to improve our understanding of which aspects are most important to providing ES to better inform approaches to its conservation. Here, we focus on the cultural ES of hiking in Wales, UK. Harnessing big data from the social media website Flickr, we used the locations of geotagged images of hiking and a range of spatial layers representing geodiversity, biodiversity and anthropogenic predictor variables in habitat suitability models. To gain a deeper understanding of the role of geodiversity in driving the distribution of this cultural service, we estimated the strength and nature of the relationship of each geodiversity, biodiversity and anthropogenic indicator with hiking. Our models show that three geodiversity (distance from coast, range in slope and range in elevation) and two anthropogenic (distance from greenspace access point and distance from road) variables were the most important drivers of hiking. Furthermore, we assessed the content of the images to understand which features of geodiversity people interact with while hiking. We found that people generally take images of geomorphological and hydrological features, such as mountains and lakes. Through understanding the geodiversity, biodiversity and anthropogenic drivers of hiking in Wales, as well as identifying the geodiversity features people interact with while hiking, this analysis can help to inform future geoconservation methods by focusing efforts on these important features.

Living and Dying on Planet Earth: an Approach to the Values of Geodiversity

“…According to Silva et al (2021), one of the most encouraging actions to protect geodiversity and geoheritage is the creation of geopark areas where places and landscapes of international geological significance are managed through a holistic concept of protection, education, and sustainable development. In the case of geodiversity sites that do not have scientific value, they may reveal educational and/or tourist value, so they should also be the target of measures of inventory, conservation, promotion, and legal protection, with appropriate management plans and considered in territorial planning plans (Pereira et al 2019;Fox et al 2022).…”

Understanding Landscape Aesthetics Using a Novel Viewshed Assessment of Social Media Locations Within the Troodos UNESCO Global Geopark, Cyprus

“…These studies have used a range of predictor variables such as vegetation cover and distance from attractions. Moving forward, the outputs of visual magnitude analysis could be used to train models to identify areas of potential aesthetic services that incorporate geodiversity variables (Fox et al, 2022). In doing so park managers could create accessible routes to new areas that could alleviate pressures of over-usage from other areas of the park (Clemente et al, 2019).…”

“…Data from Flickr has previously been used to assess the relationship between geodiversity and cultural ecosystem services (Fox et al, 2022), geoconservation (Németh et al, 2021b), as well as aesthetic services (Figueroa-Alfaro and Tang, 2017;Van Berkel et al, 2018). However, to date, no such study exists that uses Flickr data to assess aesthetic services where geodiversity or geoconservation are intersected with the visual context the user engages with.…”

Global geodiversity components are not equally represented in UNESCO Global Geoparks

“…Natural changes in geodiversity are often slow processes, dating back to the early development of plate tectonics [ 1 ]. More recently, geodiversity is rapidly changing through a variety of human activities [ 2 , 3 ]. Such human-induced changes are often related to the (over) exploitation of geosystem services [ 4 , 5 ] provided by geodiversity, for example through the mining of sand, oil, gas and rare earths.…”