Assessing the Recreation Value of Urban Woodland Using the Ecosystem Service Approach in Two Forests in the Munich Metropolitan Region

Recreation is considered an important ecosystem services (ES) in urban woodlands and puts pressure on other ES. Visitor management strategies can be tools to safeguard biodiversity and ES. On-site data are necessary to evaluate the demand for outdoor recreation opportunities in urban woodlands, but also for providing more reliable values for monetization as a basis for multifunctional forest management, and for raising awareness for the importance of urban proximate forests. Such information can also be used for the assessment and monetization of socio-cultural ES, and hence, contribute to developing market-based mechanisms or to promoting these ES. In our paper, we demonstrate methods to describe recreational demand by collecting data from interviews and using camera traps in two forests in the north of Munich for visitor counting. Visitor numbers in the forests were much greater than rough estimations; visitors also had quite long travelling distances to the forests. Jogging or Nordic walking were proven to be important recreational activities. In some of the monitored locations, almost half of the recreationists carried out these sports. Depending on the method chosen, the calculative monetary value of recreation reached up to 15,440 Euro per hectare per year.