Insight into cultural ecosystem services: comprehensive review through cluster analysis

The nature of an ecosystem shapes human culture, heritage, values, social interactions and knowledge systems as well as amenity services (i.e. aesthetic, tourism and recreation, artistic, spiritual and intellectual development) considerably; thus, any changes in an ecosystem can have significant impacts on cultural services for societies. In light of this, this paper presents the outcome of a comprehensive review of literature focusing on the current status of cultural ecosystem services (CES) and the various conceptual, ideological and methodological approaches developed and used in this context. The literature on CES covering the 2009-2016 period was screened with the aid of a structured questionnaire which was developed, pre-rested and modified to fit the purpose. An Agglomerative Hierarchical Cluster Analysis characterised by Binary Squared Euclidian distance with Centroid Clustering method was employed to analyse the responses to the questionnaire, and the result was further supported and interpreted by way of qualitative discussion. The review, as a whole, identified the importance of CES and acknowledged its contribution to wellbeing as peripherals to a bundle of services. It recognised that most studies on this phenomenon were not limited to a specific region and/or on a specific system and were rarely quantified. Further, it was remarked that those studies did not value the ecosystems very often in monetary terms, but tended towards areas like mapping and cultural landscape.