EcoService Models Library (ESML)

Document: Mapping cultural ecosystem services: A framework to assess the potential for outdoor recreation across the EU (Doc-293)

293
Authors
Paracchini, M.L., Zulian, G., Kopperoinen, L., Maes, J., Schägner, J.P., Termansen, M., Zandersen, M., Perez-Soba, M., Scholefield, P.A., and Bidoglio, G.
Year
2014
Title
Mapping cultural ecosystem services: A framework to assess the potential for outdoor recreation across the EU
Document Type
Journal Article
Journal
Ecological Indicators
Volume
45
Pages
371-385
Abstract
"Research on ecosystem services mapping and valuing has increased significantly in recent years. However, compared to provisioning and regulating services, cultural ecosystem services have not yet beenfully integrated into operational frameworks. One reason for this is that transdisciplinarity is required toaddress the issue, since by definition cultural services (encompassing physical, intellectual, spiritual inter-actions with biota) need to be analysed from multiple perspectives (i.e. ecological, social, behavioural).A second reason is the lack of data for large-scale assessments, as detailed surveys are a main sourceof information. Among cultural ecosystem services, assessment of outdoor recreation can be based ona large pool of literature developed mostly in social and medical science, and landscape and ecologystudies. This paper presents a methodology to include recreation in the conceptual framework for EUwide ecosystem assessments (Maes et al., 2013), which couples existing approaches for recreation man-agement at country level with behavioural data derived from surveys and population distribution data.The proposed framework is based on three components: the ecosystem function (recreation potential),the adaptation of the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum framework to characterise the ecosystem serviceand the distribution of potential demand in the EU. Results show that 38% of the EU is characterised bya high outdoor recreation potential, which is easily accessible, and that such areas can host about 35.4%of potential demand for close-to-home trips (<8 km). This proportion increases to 37.6% for long dis-tance travelling (<80 km). The analysis framework can be applied to quantify the availability of outdoorrecreation potential as an ecosystem service to EU citizens, to describe through country profiles differ-ences in ecosystem service provision at regional level, and can be used as an input to land use planning processes."
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