Cultural Services

Defined by the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment as “the nonmaterial benefits people obtain from ecosystems”, cultural ecosystem services list the “cultural diversity, spiritual and religious values, knowledge systems, educational values, inspiration, aesthetic values, social relations, sense of place, cultural heritage values, recreation and ecotourism”. As such, cultural services, like all ecosystem services, must demonstrate a significant relationship between ecosystem structures and functions on the one hand, see the biophysical domain, and the benefits people obtain on the other hand, within the social domain.

Even though the importance of cultural services is widely being recognized (Hernández-Morcillo et al., 2013; Milcu et al., 2013), a series of challenges related to its assessment remain for two reasons. First, CES depend strongly on human perceptions and subjective preferences that cannot be quantified without analysing societal values (Plieninger et al., 2013). Second, spatially explicit assessment is difficult because CES are not directly linked to ecosystem processes (Burkhard et al., 2012).