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

Abstract

Ecosystem services such as food provisioning, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, or recreation in open landscapes underpin human wellbeing. They are highly dependent on land use, land cover and utilization pattern as well as environmental factors like climate, topography and soil. In consequence, ecosystem services supply shows a high spatial variability. However, it is less clear if the perception of the importance of ecosystem services is similarly heterogeneous in space and amongst societal actors. The aim of this large-scale study was to explore whether land cover and climate gradients as well as socio-cultural factors influence the perceptions of ecosystem services of four groups of societal actors: citizens, farmers, foresters and nature managers. Spatially explicit survey data of 3018 respondents allowed to gain insight into the distribution of perceived importance of 21 ecosystem services in the federal state of Bavaria, Germany together with the respondents' socio-cultural characterisation (e.g. gender, education and hobbies in nature). Responses were analysed through descriptive statistics, redundancy analysis, and Generalized Linear Models. Results reveal that the perceived importance of many ecosystem services was consistently high across groups, although perception differed for some ecosystem services (e.g. production of energy plants and timber as well as recreation in urban green space). Compared to other actor groups, farmers attributed slightly lower importance to all ES except provisioning services. Socio-cultural factors better explained variability in perceived importance of ecosystem services than land cover and climate gradients. This might be either explained by the fact that the environmental gradients vary not strong enough in our case study or that they do not shape the perceptions of respondents. A limitation of the study is that the sample of respondents obtained is not representative for the population, but biased towards persons interested in the topics of the survey. Still the consensus indicated by the overall positive perception of ecosystem services among respondents highlights the integrative potential of ecosystem services when included in decision-making.

Fig 1

Study region and sampling design: A) Climate zones based on mean annual air temperature (reference period 1981–2010, DWD), B) land-use zones are based on CORINE Land Cover 2012 C) Sampling gradient shown for the 60 focal quadrants with filled colour from A) and border colour from B). Locations of surveys are shown for farmers (orange triangles: on-site locations of Offices of Food, Agriculture and Forestry; grey regions: online distribution via Offices and Agricultural Associations), foresters (online distribution via Offices and Forestry Associations to private and corporate foresters; 20 state foresters per climate zone were addressed via the Bavarian State Forestry BaySF, not depicted), citizens (black circles, urban quadrants with r = 1.5 km, non-urban quadrants r = 3 km to account for different population densities; orange hatches: location of editorial offices of newspapers that invited readers to participate in the survey via articles, r = 10 km is not true to scale of the newspapers’ range of influence); nature managers were contacted independent of their location within the study region and are thus not shown in C. D) Location of the study region Bavaria (green), in Germany and Central Europe.

Fig 2. Residence of respondents that answered the question regarding their perceived importance of ES (n = 2343, as 675 respondents did not provide their postal code), differentiated by societal actor group.

Coloured polygons represent the postal code areas.

Fig 3. Overall perceived importance per ecosystem service ES (P: provisioning services, R: regulating services, C: cultural services and S: supporting services).

The respective question was “How important are the following services of landscape and nature?” Segments in turquoise stand for the percentage share of answers in the important or very important category. Indifferent answers are split equally around zero percent. Segments in brown represent the percentage share of answers in the unimportant or very unimportant categories. Numbers on the right side of each row represent the number of responses for each respective ecosystem service. The high number of responses (i.e. 20508), is due to aggregated ES answers; each of the 3,018 respondents could give an answer for seven ES.

Fig 4. Perceived importance per ecosystem service and societal actor (i.e., citizens, farmers, foresters, and nature managers).

The index of disagreement shows differences between societal actors in perceived importance of ecosystem services.

Fig 5. Correlation plots between ecosystem services and gradient variables.

The grey rectangle frames the area of potential correlation between ecosystem services perceptions and gradient variables. Spearman correlation is calculated. Only significant correlations at p < 0.05 are shown, insignificant relationships are left blank.