This article sheds light on the complex interaction between humans and the natural world, as well as the significance of Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) in interpreting this bond. CES refers to the non-material and immaterial benefits that nature gives to human society, including nature-based tourism, landscape aesthetics, sense of place, cultural heritage, and spiritual inspiration. However, the rapid social shifts have influenced both human behaviors and the human-nature relationships, while reshaping the supply–demand relationships between CES and people. For landscape practitioners, it is necessary to use innovative approaches to comprehend and appreciate the complex cultural links between the natural ecosystem and our cultural attachments, and build a more sustainable interaction via landscape practices. The authors claim that CES can act as a bridge between landscape architecture and social shifts, offering a multidisciplinary approach to comprehending human-nature linkages and supporting sustainable development.
Under the call for “all-for-one tourism” development, the focus of regional-scale recreational services is shifting from the construction of individual scenic spots and tourist areas towards the comprehensive planning of tourist destinations, so as to propel China’s rural revitalization and regional coordinated development. In research and practice, however, it is still challenging to identity and evaluate spatial locations for developing tourism according their cultural and environmental resource and characteristics and prioritizing the high-potential ones. Employing the whole western Hubei region as a case study, this paper proposes a method of assessing recreation potential within the research framework on cultural ecosystem services, and uses multi-sourced social-ecological data to develop an SDM model via ensemble machine learning. Through analyses of the environmental features of 336 recreational hotspots in the study area, the model predicts the areas with high recreation potential in continuous areas. This study intends to establish a technique path to examine the regional-scale pattern of recreational spaces via numerical analysis of environmental features, and to provide a reference for relevant spatial development strategies of all-for-one tourism and rural revitalization.
Urban parks are an important part of urban ecosystems and can provide beneficial cultural ecosystem services (CES) to urban residents. The integration of geospatial and online comment data and relevant data mining have become a mainstream approach to the research on CES perception. This paper takes 10 typical urban parks in the central districts of Jinan, China as examples, and collects park users’ online comment data from tourism websites. Based on content analysis, high-frequency CES perception words and their perception frequencies are obtained to reveal the disparity of CES perception in different urban parks. FP-association rules are applied to examine the correlations between the perception of CES categories. Main findings are as follow. 1) Aesthetics and leisure/ecotourism services are the most easily perceived CES categories in urban parks. 2) There are differences in public’s perception of CES categories in different urban parks: aesthetics service in Baihua Park and Wulongtan Park, leisure/ecotourism service in Jinan Forest Park, and education/knowledge service in Quancheng Park, Zhongshan Park, Huashan Lake Park, and Jinan Zoo can be better perceived by the public. And 3) the perception of CES categories of urban parks is correlated. Aesthetics and leisure/ecotourism services have the strongest correlation and are often perceived with the services of cultural heritage, spiritual/religious value, and artistic inspiration. The study enriches the empirical research on CES perception via analyses of online comment data, clarifies the patterns of public’s CES perception in urban parks, and provides a scientific reference for the planning, design, and management of urban parks, showing a significance for improving CES supply and spatial quality of urban parks.
In a forest kindergarten context, young children can get boost on their level of physical activity, motor skills, social skills, pro-environmental behaviors, etc. through structured and/or unstructured nature-based educational programs. Most studies mentioned teachers, parents, and researchers as facilitators in the early childhood outdoor learning programs, while landscape architects were rarely considered. However, beyond just being involved in the design and construction of the physical environment, landscape architects can play a more profound role in the long run. This study aims to show that involving landscape architects as facilitators in the nature-based educational programs can benefit the programs in many ways and the effect can be long-lasting. The study is based on the 16 years of collaboration between Miyano-oka, a forest kindergarten, and a team of landscape architects from Takano Landscape Planning in Japan to conduct nature-based educational programs to preschoolers. It presents examples of programs in Miyano-oka and the strategies applied to develop them. In this project, landscape architects employed various design strategies to improve the existing programs and help develop new programs. Among those strategies, participatory design is the primary one. During both the renovation (from 2006 to 2008) and follow-up (from 2009 to now) phases, active participation and collaboration between designers and the educators help achieve the sustainable development of both the outdoor natural environment and educational programs.
Tobias Plieninger has contributed to framing Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) by his studies in Europe and Asia from forest to agricultural ecosystems. He introduced how the term of CES as a part of ecosystem services was raised by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment but largely neglected at the beginning. From his projects, he explored how to set up indicators and the development of a method Public Participation Geographic Information Systems to map cultural values in landscapes for CES assessment. Because of the limitation of CES, the new inclusive concepts like Nature’s Contributions to People arose. Plieninger gave us his perspective about the new tendency to use social media data to broaden the research scale, and shared his opinions about CES research in developing countries, like India and China. He suggested people should apply the methods not only in technocratic or purely in academic exercises, but to deal with real-world problems. He encouraged the young generation to further explore the frontier topics such as the role of CES in increasingly unstable times.
Hawaii is on the threshold of collapse. Over a century of American colonization and exploitation of the islands and their people has resulted in the island chain facing critical environmental and cultural catastrophe. This article examines the emergence of Rapid ‘Ōhi‘a Death as a critical aeolian pathogen capable of wiping out the most culturally and ecologically significant species representing over 50% of Hawaii’s forests. Plantation histories are unpacked as foundational tools which directly led to deep alteration to the cultural fabric and landscape of the islands, accelerating the complex issues faced by Hawaii and Hawaiians today. This crisis offers landscape architects and the design professions grounds for a new methodology to approach both ecological and cultural issues as one to tackle the issues stemming from ongoing climate change. Furthermore, the article underscores the need to rethink the American fetishization of the Hawaiian Islands and look instead to how land stewardship and landscape practices can facilitate a self-determinant, equitable, and resilient future.