The ‘desert experience’: Evaluating the cultural ecosystem services of drylands through walking and focusing

Abstract Assessment of cultural ecosystem services (CES), the non‐material benefits provided to humans by nature, is a particularly challenging activity within the complex field of ecosystem service (ES) evaluation. Assessing CES of drylands presents an even greater challenge for at least two reasons. First, assessments of dryland ES are few and limited, particularly regarding CES. Second, CES evaluation methods, even qualitative ones, generally fail to provide a deep and holistic understanding of the dynamic relationship between nature experiences, culture and identity. The current study uses a novel methodology to evaluate CES in a dryland ecosystem: walking‐focusing interviews. In these interviews, participants are encouraged to focus on various aspects of their physical, mental and cognitive experiences as they walked in a natural desert landscape. The interview protocol enabled us to capture a wealth of knowledge regarding people’s desert experiences. Findings indicate that geological phenomena and other abiotic elements of desert landscapes rank high among participants’ reported dryland CES, which inspire complex and multi‐level experiences. Other prominent themes that emerged included imagination, relaxation, wind and quiet. As deserts are low in primary productivity and therefore display less conspicuous biological elements, the protocol was found to be particularly effective for addressing both their living and non‐living CES. The methodology of walking‐focusing interviews is shown to be able to extract information pertaining to people’s holistic experience of nature, which suggests that it is a powerful methodology for CES assessments of landscapes in general.