Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 56, November 2016, Pages 251-261
Land Use Policy

Identifying and mapping the tourists⿿ perception of cultural ecosystem services: A case study from an Alpine region

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.05.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We identify and map the tourists⿿ perception of cultural ecosystem services (CES).

  • Based on landscape pictures, people⿿s perception of CES is revealed.

  • Land use type and socio-demographic factors influence the people's perception.

  • Land use type exerts the strongest influence.

  • Traditional landscapes are hotspots of aesthetics, recreation and spirituality.

Abstract

Landscapes provide an array of services to society, from the provision of food and material, to the provision of cultural ecosystem services such as recreation, aesthetics or spirituality. Studies on cultural ecosystem services, however, remain rare and little is known about the spatial localisation of these services. In this study, we adopt and test a framework to identify and map the provision of cultural ecosystem services as perceived by tourists in an Alpine region, i.e. the region of South Tyrol in Italy. A photo-based questionnaire survey is combined with cartographical representations of landscape types to elicit hot and coldspot areas of cultural ecosystem service provision. We statistically test for influences of the land use type and the respondents' socio-demographic background on the tourists' perception of these services. The results show that different spatial patterns emerge for each of the investigated cultural ecosystem services depending on the distribution and extent of the landscape types to which they are related. In particular traditionally managed landscapes, small in extent and mainly scattered over large areas between 1000 and 2200 m a.s.l., are hotspot areas of aesthetic beauty, leisure activities and spirituality. In contrast, intensively managed landscapes, mainly located in the lowland plains of the study site, are considered to be more important for the provision of cultural heritage values. While the results suggest that land use type exerts the strongest influence upon tourists' perception, factors such as the respondents' perceived importance of the services, their gender, cultural background, environmental engagement and experience with the landscape play a significant but subordinate role. We conclude that the spatially explicit information about the provision of cultural ecosystem services can serve as a helpful basis for the design and further implementation of land use policies that acknowledge the high touristic value of traditionally used landscapes in mountain regions.

Introduction

European landscapes are a valued source for a variety of different ecosystem services such as the provision of food and timber, but also of non-material benefits including aesthetic or heritage values (van Zanten et al., 2014). Over the last decades, however, European landscapes were subject to major transformations, mainly being the result of two polarised trends in land use change (Plieninger et al., 2013a, Gingrich et al., 2015). In the course of an increasing large-scale industrialisation of agriculture across Europe, the most productive lands were intensified, whereas more marginal, and least accessible lands, mainly situated in the upland areas, were abandoned and subsequently converted to forests (MacDonald et al., 2000, Zimmermann et al., 2010). As a result, many traditionally used landscapes, characteristic for the European rich history of culture and place-specific human-nature relationships, are currently put at risk (Plieninger et al., 2006, Fontana et al., 2013). Changes in landscape structure and composition have led to the degradation of many associated services such as the visual quality of the landscape, appreciated by various stakeholders including tourists (e.g. Hunziker, 1995, Fyhri et al., 2009).

The European Landscape Convention defines landscape as ⿿an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of human and/or natural factors⿿ (CoE, 2000). The convention's focus on the human production of meaning in interaction with the biophysical aspects of the landscape closely reflects the concept of cultural ecosystem services (CES). CES are ⿿the nonmaterial benefits people obtain from ecosystems through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences⿿ (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005, p. 40). Together with the provisioning and regulating service category, commonly distinguished by ecosystem service classification schemes (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005, Haines-Young and Potschin, 2013), CES represent the multiple ways humans obtain benefits from nature.

In recent years, the ecosystem service framework has been established as a powerful tool to facilitate communication between scientists and policy-makers (Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2010), and in particular, to foster the implementation of more sustainable land use practices (de Groot et al., 2010). However, cultural ecosystem services have hardly been considered in recommendations regarding land use options. Furthermore, few studies have attempted to provide measures of cultural ecosystem services as they relate to specific ecosystems or regions (Norton et al., 2012). Thus, whilst there are now numerous indicators for the majority of ecosystem services, indicators for CES remain rare (Feld et al., 2009) ⿿ recreational services and aesthetic appreciation being few exceptions to this (Hernández-Morcillo et al., 2013). In particular, more experiential services such as spirituality, cultural heritage, or sense of place, are commonly missed out as they require different measures to those generally used in economically and biophysically informed trade-off analyses (Daily et al., 2009, Hernández-Morcillo et al., 2013). Motivated by this underrepresentation and the increasing significance of CES in industrialised societies (Guo et al., 2010), a growing number of scholars recently started to investigate and discuss a broad range of CES with special emphasis on the development of new typologies (e.g. Chan et al., 2012) and methodological approaches (e.g. Raymond et al., 2009, Plieninger et al., 2013b, Bieling, 2014).

One widely acknowledged challenge when dealing with CES is their intangibility (Milcu et al., 2013) and normativity (Daniel et al., 2012). Contrary to other services, which can be quantified independently from the presence of humans (e.g. water supply and regulation) ⿿ as they mostly depend on natural attributes ⿿ CES are closely linked to personal and local value systems (Pejchar and Mooney, 2009). CES arise from the complex relationship between humans and nature, what makes the consideration of factors related to the observer, such as the social, cultural or psychological background, alongside biophysical features necessary (Chee, 2004, Kumar and Kumar, 2008). As a consequence, some commentators in the constructivist tradition dismiss the very possibility that these characteristics can be accounted for by the common narrative of ecosystem service assessments, where CES are measured as ⿿objective⿿ entities linked to ecosystem processes and functions (Ernstson, 2013). Other authors, however, emphasise the need to integrate CES alongside other services to better inform decision-making processes, and ask for the integration of social science disciplines to overcome these challenges (Daniel et al., 2012, Katz-Gerro and Orenstein, 2015). In response to this debate, recently conducted studies assessing CES made use of a set of different methodologies drawn from the social sciences and humanities, including extensive questionnaire surveys, group deliberations, and in-depth interviews, which were sometimes further enriched by the use of pictures (e.g. Sherren et al., 2010, López-Santiago et al., 2014) or participatory maps (e.g. Raymond et al., 2009, Brown and Brabyn, 2012, Scolozzi et al., 2014).

Despite notable progress in the identification and assessment of CES, a number of questions remain unresolved and need further investigation. One of the biggest challenges is the identification of a clear relationship between CES and certain elements of the ecosystem (Vejre et al., 2010). Bieling (2014) demonstrated that people portray concrete landscape features, places or biophysical attributes in their narratives about experiencing CES. Participatory mapping studies (e.g. Fagerholm et al., 2012, Plieninger et al., 2013b) further proved that participants are able and willing to assign CES to certain landscapes and the elements therein. Yet it is unclear how strong the relationship between biophysical features and the associated values for the different CES is and which role a different land use or cultural context might play (Bieling and Plieninger, 2013).

Furthermore, knowledge about the spatial localisation of CES could greatly benefit the elaboration of future land use strategies. Mapping the provision of services can be a powerful means to communicate the value of landscapes to policy makers and practitioners (Swetnam et al., 2011) and for informing trade-off analysis and negotiations between different services delivered by the landscape (de Groot, 2006). In short, the mapping of CES can help to delineate high priority areas for future service management (Plieninger et al., 2013b). However, neither is the spatial localisation of service providing units (Syrbe and Walz, 2012) trivial for CES, nor is the differentiation between potential supply and actual demand for the services always possible (Burkhard et al., 2014). Spangenberg et al. (2014) points out that it is appropriate to distinguish between ⿿ecosystem service potential⿿ and the ⿿ecosystem services factually used⿿. While the ecosystem services potential are generated through the humans' attribution of use values to certain biophysical traits, ultimately defining the kind of service realised, ecosystem services potential translate into factually used flows (i.e. ecosystem services) when further human capital such as time, energy or labour are invested for their mobilisation.

Against this background, the goal of this study is to develop a framework, which, by combining elements from ecosystem service and landscape research, is capable of identifying and mapping the potential supply of four CES in the landscape as perceived by people: the opportunity for leisure activities, aesthetic beauty, spirituality and cultural heritage (see Table 1 for a definition of the services). The framework is applied to the region of South Tyrol (Italy), located in the Central Alps, and specifically addresses tourists visiting the area. Our approach consists of two parts, where in a first step the tourists' perceptions about the landscape's potential to deliver CES are prompted, discerning ten different landscape types. To accomplish this, a paper-based questionnaire is used together with a picture sheet, a tool commonly employed in landscape research (Daniel, 2001). In the second part, the tourists' revealed perceptions are translated into maps using Geographic Information Systems. Based on statistical analyses, factors determining the tourists' perception including the respondents' socio-demographic background, their environmental behaviour and their experience with the landscape, their perceived importance of the CES as well as different land use types are scrutinized. In particular, we address the following research questions:

  • -

    Which CES do tourists mostly associate with the landscape?

  • -

    Which landscapes are preferred in terms of their potential to supply CES?

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    How is the tourists' perceived importance of the CES interlinked with their perception about their supply?

  • -

    Which role does land use type, the respondents' socio-demographic background, their environmental behaviour and their experience with the landscape play in determining the tourists' perception of CES?

Section snippets

Study region

South Tyrol is the northern-most province of Italy, located in the Central Alps and covers an area of 7400 km2. Tourism plays an important role in the local economy, contributing 16.2% to the total regional GDP (Autonome Provinz Bozen, 2012). South Tyrol is a popular holiday destination during summer and winter times. Between June and September 2014, a total number of 2,846,275 tourists were recorded, among them 57% from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and 31% coming from different provinces

The perceived supply of cultural ecosystem services

Aesthetic beauty and leisure activities were the most frequently perceived services in the South Tyrolean landscape, while cultural heritage, and to an even lesser extent spirituality, in contrast, played a subordinate role. The overall perception of the four CES corresponds to the tourists' perceived importance of these services. The tourists highly considered the aesthetic beauty of the South Tyrolean landscape (x¯=4.61) and the opportunities for leisure activities therein (x¯=4.43.) when

Cultural ecosystem services provided by the landscape

Spatially explicit studies are still rare in ecosystem service literature and therefore, little is known about how specific landscapes, landscape features or ecosystem properties contribute to people's perception and socio-cultural valuation of ecosystem services (López-Santiago et al., 2014, Scholte et al., 2015). In this paper, we have adopted and tested a framework for identifying and mapping the provision of CES that tourists perceive in the study area. The photo-based questionnaire survey

Conclusions

In this study, we developed and tested a framework to identify and map the provision of CES as perceived by tourists in a mountain region. Based on the results, we conclude that (1) the perception of CES in the landscape is both driven by the land use type and the socio-demographic characteristics related to the respondents, (2) the land use type exerts the strongest influence upon tourists' perception, and (3) the combination of the photo-based questionnaire survey with cartographical

Acknowledgements

This research was partly funded by the Merit-project (ERA-NET Program RURAGRI, FP 7, CA 235175), by the Italian-Austrian bilateral project ⿿Ecology of the Alpine Area⿿ and the HRSMV-project KlimAgro (Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy). KHE acknowledges funding from ERC-2010-stg-263522 (⿿LUISE⿿). The authors want to thank Peter Verburg, Samantha S.K. Scholte and Boris T. van Zanten for their helpful comments and discussions on an earlier version of the study design and the

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