Ecosystem Services Cultural Services Overview

This class of ecosystem services is the most difficult to assess quantitatively. It requires a simultaneous understanding of the ecological and cultural contexts (Daniel et al. 2012) and the changes in their values are not always clearly linked to ecological changes (Chan et al. 2012). Cultural services are also typically "bundled," in the sense that an ecosystem that holds heritage, spiritual and/or inspirational values may very well also provide more tangible recreational benefits (Plieninger et al. 2013). Recreational benefits (e.g. angling and sport fishing; tourism) are the most commonly quantified (Hernandez et al. 2013), but there have been numerous attempts to assess the less tangible cultural services. In monetary valuation exercises, these services should not be assessed separately as they are not independent and evaluating them as distinct services leads to double counting.

We strongly recommend considering a context-appropriate measure for cultural services in the Freshwater Health Index. In basins where you expect that conservation and cultural heritage benefits (5.6.1) will be highly correlated with recreation benefits (5.6.2), it will be suitable to measure just one, though some information on the omitted service should be included in the accompanying narrative. Below, we briefly summarize some of the most common proxies (based on secondary data) used in other assessments as well as methods that can be employed to collect primary data more tailored to the specific issue(s) in your basin.