The large and rapidly growing recreation and tourism sector can have negative effects on biodiversity. It is, therefore, necessary to determine the overlap between species and habitats sensitive to tourism and recreation and ecosystem features underpinning cultural ecosystem services (CES). CES can be defined as intangible benefits people obtain from nature exposure and are considered important contributors to human wellbeing. Here we used social media data to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the ecosystem features and human activities underpinning human-nature interactions. We used a bottom-up approach to build a repertoire of CES human activities and CES nature features. We queried Reddit to retrieve a complete list of nature features mentioned in nature dedicated conversations and human activities mentioned in conversations dedicated to outdoor activities. We then sampled Twitter to estimate the co-occurrence of nature features and human activities in tweets. We estimated the CES bipartite network from those tweets, where each edge was weighted by the number of times nature features and human activities co-occurred in tweets. Nature features associated with marine wetlands had a high generality and there was a high dependence of activities on these features. Thus, identifying marine ecosystems as important contributors to providing CES. The framework developed here provides a new method for investigating human-nature interactions and can be further used at a finer scale to identify specific features of these ecosystems underpinning CES.

Primary Presenter: Anne Cathrine Linder, Technical University of Denmark (acali@aqua.dtu.dk)

Authors:

David Lusseau, Technical University of Denmark  (davlu@aqua.dtu.dk)