By Joern Fischer

The session on cultural ecosystem services had quite a bit more nice stuff in it, some of which I summarise here. Overall, this was one of the most integrative sessions I saw at ESA, with a whole bunch of speakers well equipped to look beyond “straight ecology”.

Rachelle Gould presented case studies from British Columbia and Hawaii, both of which were pilot studies for the NCEAS working group on cultural services. She reported on an interview protocol that was used in both of these study areas – basically, the aim was to assess whether the interview protocol worked well, and whether it actually elicited cultural ES in a meaningful way. Interestingly, the interview process was designed to be all about ecosystem-related activities, management, and spatial distribution of important services – and only in the end did the discussion shift to cultural services. Rachelle felt this was quite…