Uncovering ecosystem service bundles through social preferences

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Berta Martín-López
  • Irene Iniesta-Arandia
  • Marina García-Llorente
  • Ignacio Palomo
  • Izaskun Casado-Arzuaga
  • David García Del Amo
  • Erik Gómez-Baggethun
  • Elisa Oteros-Rozas
  • Igone Palacios-Agundez
  • Bárbara Willaarts
  • José A. González
  • Fernando Santos-Martín
  • Miren Onaindia
  • Cesar López-Santiago
  • Carlos Montes

Ecosystem service assessments have increasingly been used to support environmental management policies, mainly based on biophysical and economic indicators. However, few studies have coped with the social-cultural dimension of ecosystem services, despite being considered a research priority. We examined how ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs emerge from diverging social preferences toward ecosystem services delivered by various types of ecosystems in Spain. We conducted 3,379 direct face-to-face questionnaires in eight different case study sites from 2007 to 2011. Overall, 90.5% of the sampled population recognized the ecosystem's capacity to deliver services. Formal studies, environmental behavior, and gender variables influenced the probability of people recognizing the ecosystem's capacity to provide services. The ecosystem services most frequently perceived by people were regulating services; of those, air purification held the greatest importance. However, statistical analysis showed that socio-cultural factors and the conservation management strategy of ecosystems (i.e., National Park, Natural Park, or a non-protected area) have an effect on social preferences toward ecosystem services. Ecosystem service trade-offs and bundles were identified by analyzing social preferences through multivariate analysis (redundancy analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis). We found a clear trade-off among provisioning services (and recreational hunting) versus regulating services and almost all cultural services. We identified three ecosystem service bundles associated with the conservation management strategy and the rural-urban gradient. We conclude that socio-cultural preferences toward ecosystem services can serve as a tool to identify relevant services for people, the factors underlying these social preferences, and emerging ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere38970
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume7
Issue number6
Number of pages11
ISSN1932-6203
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 18.06.2012
Externally publishedYes

Documents

DOI

Recently viewed

Researchers

  1. Lea-Katharina Rzadtki

Publications

  1. Kinder als Manager
  2. The 'need for speed'
  3. Entrepreneurship as Facilitator for Sustainable Development?
  4. Emotional states of drivers and the impact on speed, acceleration and traffic violations - A simulator study
  5. Pesticide and metabolite fate, release and transport modelling at catchment scale
  6. Spatial planning and territorial governance
  7. Schreiben in Deutsch
  8. Multitrait-multimethod-analysis
  9. The Cape Town Convention and the Space Assets Protocol
  10. Utopian Hacks
  11. Seven Building Blocks for an Intergenerationally Just Democracy
  12. Establishing the next generation at work
  13. Gasteditorial
  14. Medial erzeugte Befindlichkeiten
  15. Instrumentierung der Abfallvermeidung - ein Strukturproblem?
  16. Verbalised Speechlessness: Online mourning practices
  17. The "argumentative turn" revisited
  18. "Local Data" in European Choice of Law
  19. Socio-technical change linking expectations and representations
  20. Walking By Myself
  21. Estimation of the economy of heterotrophic microalgae- and insect-based food waste utilization processes
  22. Optical part measuring inside a milling machine
  23. Multinational Enterprise Strategies for Addressing Sustainability
  24. Why phubbing is toxic for your relationship: Understanding the role of smartphone jealousy among "Generation Y" users
  25. Calibration of the Chemcatcher ® passive sampler for monitoring selected polar and semi-polar pesticides in surface water
  26. Conclusions and Outlook
  27. Nothing lasts forever: Dominant species decline under rapid environmental change in global grasslands
  28. What shapes ground beetle assemblages in a tree species-rich subtropical forest?
  29. Customer accounting with budgets and activity-based costing