Contributions of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda

TLDR

Cultural ecosystem services are widely acknowledged yet remain poorly defined and integrated into the ES framework, despite extensive models, methods, and data developed in social and behavioral sciences. The authors review landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance to operationally define cultural services via socio‑ecological models, and propose a common representation that frames all ES by the relative contribution of ecological structures and social evaluation approaches. These models link ecological structures and functions to cultural values, enabling stakeholder communication and multi‑criterion evaluation, and lay a foundation for integrating cultural services into the broader ES framework.

Abstract

Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are consistently recognized but not yet adequately defined or integrated within the ES framework. A substantial body of models, methods, and data relevant to cultural services has been developed within the social and behavioral sciences before and outside of the ES approach. A selective review of work in landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance demonstrates opportunities for operationally defining cultural services in terms of socioecological models, consistent with the larger set of ES. Such models explicitly link ecological structures and functions with cultural values and benefits, facilitating communication between scientists and stakeholders and enabling economic, multicriterion, deliberative evaluation and other methods that can clarify tradeoffs and synergies involving cultural ES. Based on this approach, a common representation is offered that frames cultural services, along with all ES, by the relative contribution of relevant ecological structures and functions and by applicable social evaluation approaches. This perspective provides a foundation for merging ecological and social science epistemologies to define and integrate cultural services better within the broader ES framework.