Perceptions of ecosystem services: Comparing socio-cultural and environmental influences

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Social Science
• Ecology

Background:

• Ecosystem services (ES) are crucial for human wellbeing and exhibit spatial variability.
• Understanding the perception of ES importance across different societal actors and spatial scales is less clear.
• Land use, land cover, climate, topography, and soil influence ES supply.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how land cover, climate, and socio-cultural factors affect the perception of 21 ecosystem services among citizens, farmers, foresters, and nature managers.
• To analyze the spatial distribution of perceived ES importance in Bavaria, Germany.
• To compare the influence of environmental versus socio-cultural factors on ES perception.

Main Methods:

• Spatially explicit survey data from 3018 respondents.
• Analysis using descriptive statistics, redundancy analysis, and Generalized Linear Models.
• Inclusion of respondents' socio-cultural characteristics (gender, education, nature-related hobbies).

Main Results:

• High perceived importance of many ES across all actor groups.
• Differing perceptions for specific ES like energy plant production, timber, and urban recreation.
• Socio-cultural factors were stronger predictors of ES perception than land cover and climate gradients.
• Farmers showed slightly lower importance for all ES except provisioning services.

Conclusions:

• Perception of ecosystem services is influenced more by socio-cultural factors than environmental gradients in this study.
• The integrative potential of ES in decision-making is highlighted by the general consensus on their importance.
• Further research is needed to understand the role of environmental gradients and to ensure representative sampling.