Cultural ecosystem services provided by rivers across diverse social-ecological landscapes: A social media analysis

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are an important component of the benefits that humans derive from nature. Yet, research on CES at landscape scales has lagged behind other ecosystem services, due to the difficulty measuring CES across broad scales and the uncertainty about the mechanisms linking CES provisioning to biophysical characteristics. Social media data has emerged as an important tool for quantifying CES. We applied a bottom-up, data-driven approach to capture rich information about CES from the text (title, tags, descriptions) associated with geo-located Flickr images across river ecosystems in Idaho, USA. We address the following four questions: 1) What CES do people obtain from rivers in Idaho? 2) How does overall CES provisioning vary across ecosystem characteristics? 3) How do specific CES relate to ecosystem characteristics? and 4) Do CES bundle in ways that parallel traditional CES categories? Overall, we were able to identify diverse CES not typically examined in empirical studies as well as how landscape features support CES provisioning. Relating CES to biophysical, social, and built characteristics of the ecosystem, CES provisioning was significantly but weakly associated with access to rivers, land cover, and land ownership. The importance of social and built characteristics of the landscape suggests the cascade model in which ecosystem services flow from ecosystem structure has limited utility for specifically addressing CES. In addition, we found specific CES are more strongly associated with landscape variables than general CES categories. This difference highlights that traditional CES categories fail to reflect how individual CES are distributed over space. Text provides information-rich source for moving beyond a small number of broad CES categories and understanding not only the diversity of ways people interact with landscapes, but what landscape features support these uses.