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Proceedings of the International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, 2022, 12(3): 194-210
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Article

Evaluation methods for cultural ecosystem services: A systematic review

Sheenu Sharma, Sabir Hussain, Anand Narain Singh
Soil Ecosystem and Restoration Ecology Lab, Department of Botany, Panjab University, Chandigarh, 160014, India

Received 15 March 2022;Accepted 14 April 2022;Published online 12 August 2022;Published 1 September 2022
IAEES

Abstract
Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are intangible and non-material benefits provided by ecosystems that have been ignored by stakeholders and policymakers in comparison to provisioning, supporting, and regulating services. The ecosystem services concept was designed to define and evaluate the benefits humans derived from ecosystems. The present study conducts a systematic literature review of CES evaluation methods. Our aims are: to provide an overview of the current state of CES research, to describe the geographic distribution of research, to classify and evaluate CES categories and evaluation methods, to highlight and discuss the overall review of the literature and some important challenges in CES research. In this review, we reviewed 127 case studies and extracted 22 evaluation methods. Based upon findings from literature synthesis, we conclude that (1) a consistent classification and description of CES categories are highly required; (2) we have taken into account all the CES categories during evaluation; (3) the majority of studies tend to focus on recreation and ecotourism services followed by aesthetic values and educational values; (4) we employed various methods extracted from literature and find non-monetary methods mainly were used to evaluate CES; (5) we recommend that an in-depth analysis of CES evaluation methods is a need to improve the importance of CES for local people, stakeholders and policymakers. The present information can potentially act as a fruitful conceptual multidisciplinary research into a human-dominated environment.

Keywords cultural ecosystem services (CES);evaluation;policy-making;monetary;non-monetary.


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