Hi Somidh,

I think the paper here attached may help to answer your question. Please have a look. Thanks.

Thanks a lot. This will be very helpful. Regards Somidh

Article Valuing Cultural Ecosystem Services

Have you looked at "Blueprint for a Green Economy" by David Pearce et al? He's got some ideas on how to value these kinds of services?

Cultural Ecosystem Services are the non-material benefits people obtain from nature. They include recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, physical and mental health benefits and spiritual experiences. Cultural Ecosystem services are essential for human health and well-being and contribute to a sense of place while fostering social cohesion.

Thank you so much Olivier for your nice paper

I would start by identifying what you exactly mean by cultural ecosystem services. Is it more appropriate with the broader term "social values"? If so, these refs regarding social values from nature are appropriate reads:

Article The study of human values in understanding and managing soci...

https://doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2020.1754454

Hi Somidh Saha, Kelli Larson led a methods paper last year on measuring people's subjective evaluations of ecosystem services for the urban environment, cultural ecosystem services among these.

https://ecologyandsociety.org/vol24/iss2/art7/

Hopefully, this is helpful!

Dear Back Thomas, Dear Riley: thanks for sharing two amazing papers. Regards from Karlsruhe, Germany, Somidh

You could apply monetary standards as well. A survey asking what peoples "willingness to pay" for the ecosystem services would be on example. By asking users of the area "how much would you pay to maintain this area in its current condition?", you would be able to quantify one value that expresses the importance of this resource compared to other similar activities (which city park is the most "valuable" to its residents).

Dear Wiil, thanks for your answer. We have also thought about it? But dont you think that this question can be very abstract? should we add some explanations? or should we add some options on monetary values to select from the group of choices? if you know some published literature on this matter for exclusively urban forests/street trees then please share. we also have to think that the survey should be kept as simple as possible because we want to keep it for 10 min and it will be designed for all citizens of the city. we will of course do a follow up detailed survey focusing on specific groups of stakeholders.

I suspect that our subjective assessments are rapidly changing!

First of all, there are two different questions to look at. The first is the value and status of the eco-system and the second is the value and the quantity of the service. By focussing on eco-system services and not the capital we tend to miss important aspects. The first is the value of the natural capital. Capital is something which is used in production but not used up. Built capital (like houses) are valued at "market value" that is what someone is prepared to pay for them, rather than their replacement cost, which must form some baseline. The next value and quantity is that of "roof over head" or apartments. Again, unless you have controlled rents (Germany) you have the valuation of what people are prepared to pay. So the quantification is the number of apartments and with number of bedrooms, total potential housing people/year.

Value is tricky. If I have a home I will not want to respond to a "flats to rent" sign. But if homeless and with money I might. Homeless without money I won't.

Now. let us assume that we want our population to have a service. What natural capital is needed to provide that service? Now you have a dimension. What natural capital do we have? Now you have a gap to work with. Do we have the capital and are still not providing the service? Now you have a production gap.

But of course, the difficult thing is what service?

There IS one measure though of ecosystems - maturity. See Odum et al. Easy to measure, mature eco-systems represent capital that can be used to provide services. Mature eco-systems have high mass, absorb sunlight, control rain, provide biodiversity etc etc.

So that brings me to answer that 1) measure the ecological maturity. 2) Dimension the natural capital needed by the geographical region the capital shall serve. 3) identify the services remembering that you need to extract the services without degrading maturity. Clever people(indigenous) increase maturity AND extract services at the same time. Read Odum if you haven't already.

Dear Stephen, thank you for your thought provoking comment which will be certainly helpful.

Dear Amy, you raised a very interesting point. The result of subjective assessments such as assessing the public perceptions on cultural ecosystem services can chage with annual, decadal, and centurial scale. For us, with funding and time limitation, it will be difficult to replicate same assessments for multiple years in the current project. However, in long term, we will try to carry such survey in a regular interval, like the same way we collect data from long-term permanent field-ecology experiments. By this way, we can test how human perceptions change over time. We can also look the archives of the city to develop an idea how urban forest composition changes in last 300 years in our city. By that way, we would able to see how residents of the city prefered urabn tree species compostion and structure over time. Meanwhile, we will try to convince the funding agencies and local governments to fund a long-term initiative to perform subjective assessments on cultural ecosystem services ina regular interval. Although, I can forsee the challenge to randomize the respondents in such a survey. Regards

Another challenge is that, as far as I can tell and at least in NYC, local elected officials think as far ahead as the next election cycle.

Dear Amy, this is a problem in many places in the world. We (researchers) can act as a bridge between citizens, city civil administrations, and elected politicians of the city council to have constructive and continuous societal dialogues to illustrate the importance of keeping our city green and prioritize the importance of urban forests in urban development. For instance, we try to do this in our ongoing project. You can read that in the AP4 and AP5 (AP is the short form of work package in German) in our project website (unfortunately in German, we are working on an English version): https://www.projekt-gruenelunge.de/

Hi,

This is a bit of a different methodology for evaluating cultural ecosystem services.

Article The 'desert experience': Evaluating the cultural ecosystem s...

In the introduction we also explore other options, so that might also be helpful for you.

Hope this helps,

Yael.

In recent years, people are interacting less with nature. This change in behaviour has been attributed to urbanisation, biodiversity loss, technological changes and safety concerns (Gaston et al., 2018; Soga & Gaston, 2016). However, there is a large body of evidence that demonstrates that exposure and relatedness to nature is beneficial for physical and mental health (Dean et al., 2018; Franco, Shanahan, & Fuller, 2017; Wood, Hooper, Foster, & Bull, 2017).

Although it is helpful to identify broad patterns in public perceptions towards forest attributes, particularly for the development of policy, existing research has repeatedly shown the importance of local contexts.

cultural ecosystem services have been neglected in valuation frameworks due to their perceived intangibility. The methodology developed here shows that it is possible to ascertain, in a statistically rigorous manner, whether land management (rather than landscape features) affects cultural ecosystem service values, and it provides detailed information about trade‐offs between different management options.

Hi, I wrote a bit about this, especially focusing on cultural ecosystem services. In case you need a source (open access):

Article The 'desert experience': Evaluating the cultural ecosystem s...

Go through this paper

Thank you so much, Yael for sharing your very nice paper. it will be helpful to us.

find the attachment.... Dr Somidh Saha