Paper

Calculating Cultural Ecosystem Services as Part of Greenspace Management?

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Abstract

Lake related greenspace provides many benefits to residents and visitors, which are often under-valued. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Project (2005) proposed the valuation of ecosystem services, defined as regulatory, provisional, ecosystem support and cultural services provided for us by nature, free of charge. The challenge here is: How can we use cultural ecosystem services derived from scenic landscapes for greenspace management and assessment?

Cultural ecosystem services received international recognition as part of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Project (2005). Also, as part of ecosystems services, are regulatory, provisional and ecosystem support. For this paper we are particularly concerned with cultural services, which include recreation, science and education, spiritual/historic as well as aesthetic functions. De Groot et al (2002) and Farber et al (2006) offer a progression of description of cultural Ecosystem services. De Groot et al (2002) describes Information functions as including; aesthetic information, recreation, cultural artistic information and spiritual/historic information. Farber et al (2005) for cultural services include; aesthetic, recreation, science/education, and spiritual/historic functions.

This paper presents ecosystem cultural services related to water based scenic landscape resources and then applies it to an Upstate New York lake landscape. A very careful accounting of greenspace ecosystem services is presented as they are applied to lakeshore residents, village residents and town/watershed residents and lake greenspace users utilizing user benefit calculations to yield over 10.6 million dollars of benefits per year (Smardon 2018).

Keywords: cultural ecosystem services, landscape, lake, property value

How to Cite:

Gavitt, J. M. & Smardon, R. M., (2019) “Calculating Cultural Ecosystem Services as Part of Greenspace Management?”, Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning 6(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/r6br-qe22