Quantifying cultural ecosystem services: Disentangling the effects of management from landscape features

Abstract Cultural ecosystem services are undeniably important, yet are typically neglected in land management decisions due to a suite of intractable challenges: they are highly complex, localised, and inextricably associated with landscape features. However, to incorporate the ecosystem services framework into land management, decision‐makers need the tools to disentangle the effects of land use from other factors. This is a major challenge for ecosystem services research. Forestry is a widespread land use that has considerable potential to deliver a broad range of ecosystem services, although this requires careful management planning. Additionally, modern production forestry is undergoing a period of rapid change in the face of a plethora of challenges, such as climate change and disease. To increase cultural ecosystem services delivery from forests, managers need tools to understand the implications of different management options. In this paper, we directly test how land use affects cultural ecosystem services. We use a new approach that recognises the underlying complexity of cultural ecosystem services but produces easily interpretable results that are locally relevant and directly applicable to land management. By combining participatory geographic information systems (GIS) and a novel site matching technique, we relate cultural values explicitly to land management, while accounting for the influence of landscape features. Applying this new method to a major UK forest site, we conducted a large survey to gather participatory GIS data points. We showed that land management significantly affected cultural ecosystem service values and were able to make a series of practical forest management recommendations. Notably, a greater diversity of tree species would improve cultural value, and open space is important within the forest landscape. This approach is highly flexible and can be applied to any type of landscape. It allows cultural ecosystem services to be fully integrated into land management decisions to formulate the best management strategy to maximise ecosystem service delivery. A plain language summary is available for this article.