Using Citizen Science to evaluate the cultural value of biodiversity

Biodiversity provides a cultural ecosystem service by enhancing people’s lives both actively and passively, for example, via bird-watching or walking through a park. Recreational benefits of biodiversity are now recognised... [ view full abstract ]

Biodiversity provides a cultural ecosystem service by enhancing people’s lives both actively and passively, for example, via bird-watching or walking through a park. Recreational benefits of biodiversity are now recognised to be both significant and undervalued. Access to greenspace has been shown to have many positive impacts on human health and well-being but more research is needed to understand the specific components of natural environments that are responsible. Identifying the aspects of biodiversity perceived by the public as most valuable would allow us to track their changing status and incorporate their stocks into decision-making thus ensuring their contribution to human wellbeing is not lost.
Biodiversity’s value to people is difficult to assess because the beneficiaries are acting as individuals, differently motivated and scattered across the country. Citizen science approaches offer an ideal means to gather data, not only on biodiversity itself, but also on people’s motivations for encountering it. We use citizen science records as metrics for evaluating the cultural value of biodiversity. We assume that the effort to record an observation reflects the value of the recorded species and that volunteering is a contribution to wellbeing. We use the composition of citizen science data collected across the London boroughs of Camden and Westminster as a case-study to explore which components of biodiversity have the most value to people (e.g. colourful, rare, native, easy to spot/birds, butterflies, flowering plants etc.), where biodiversity provides the most value (e.g. garden, park, urban street) and when (e.g. season, weekend).
An understanding of how the cultural value of biodiversity varies with taxon and environmental setting has high relevance for urban planning and natural capital accounting. It will also allow us to build models of volunteer behaviour, hence facilitating the most appropriate use of citizen science in biodiversity monitoring.