Understanding different cultural ecosystem services: An exploration of rural landscape preferences based on geographic and social media data

Assessing production-living-ecological spaces and its urban-rural gradients in Xiangyang City, China: insights from land-use function symbiosis

Understanding the formation process and pattern of production-living-ecological spaces (PLES) is crucial for sustainable land-use management and adaptive city governance. However, previous studies have neglected the symbiotic relationships between land-use functions (LUFs) in identifying and optimizing PLES. To address this gap, this paper proposes a technical framework for assessing PLES from a LUF symbiosis perspective. A case study was conducted in Xiangyang City, China, to identify PLES and analyze its urban-rural differentiation using the symbiosis degree model and landscape pattern indices. Our findings revealed that the symbiotic relationships between LUFs varied. There were 25 combination types of PLES in Xiangyang City, with significantly varied area proportions and spatial distribution. The landscape types and fragmentation of PLES increased along with the gradient change from the old urban area to the rural area. Furthermore, we proposed a PLES optimization strategy involving LUFs symbiosis and the urban-rural gradient. Our study enriches the dimensions of PLES assessment and supports better-coordinated planning and the protection of PLES.

Assessing the Cultural Ecosystem Services Value of Protected Areas Considering Stakeholders' Preferences and Trade-Offs-Taking the Xin'an River Landscape Corridor Scenic Area as an Example

Improving the accuracy of cultural ecosystem services (CESs) value assessment and paying more attention to the preferences and trade-offs of stakeholders in the administration of CESs are of vital importance for achieving resilient ecosystem management. Combining methodologies from sociology (Q method) and economics (choice experiment), an assessment framework of CESs is introduced to examine stakeholders' preferences and willingness to pay to participate in CESs in protected areas so as to explore how the value of CESs in protected areas can be optimized. The results show that the selection of CESs by stakeholders reflects certain synergies and trade-offs. Visitors can be classified as preferring humanistic-natural recreation, aesthetic-sense of place, or environmental education according to the factor ranking of the Q method. Visitors have a higher willingness to pay for humanistic heritage and a lower willingness to pay for sense of place experience, which can be measured at $6.55 per visit and $0.96 per visit, respectively. This indicates that the local customs and characteristics should be further explored and promoted through traditional festival celebrations and farming activities in further development of protected areas, apart from protecting local cultural heritages such as Huizhou ancient villages and halls. Furthermore, it is also necessary to actively explore the synergistic development of CESs, promote social participation, raise stakeholders' awareness of available services, manage visitors and stakeholders from a demand perspective, and promote the realization of the value of ecological products in protected areas.

The Evaluation of Rural Outdoor Dining Environment from Consumer Perspective

The quality of the environment should be measured by the satisfaction of the public and guided by the issues of public concern. With the development of the internet, social media as the main platform for people to exchange information has become a data source for planning and management analysis. Nowadays, the rural catering industry is becoming increasingly competitive, especially after the pandemic. How to further enhance the competitiveness of the rural catering industry has become a hot topic in the industry. From the perspective of consumers, we explored consumers' preferences in a rural outdoor dining environment through social media data. The research analyzed the social media data through manual collection and object detection, divided the landscape of the rural outdoor dining environment into eight categories with 35 landscape elements, and then used BP (Back Propagation) neural network nonlinear fitting and least square linear fitting to analyze the 11,410 effective review pictures from eight rural restaurants' social media comments in Chengdu. We derived the degree of consumer preference for the landscape quality of the rural outdoor dining environment and analyzed the differences in preference among three different groups (regular customers, customers with children, and customers with the elderly). The study found that agricultural resources are an important factor in the competitiveness of rural restaurant environments; that children's emotions when using activity facilities can positively influence consumers' dining experiences; that safety and hygiene environment are important factors influencing the decisions of parent-child dining; and that older people are more interested in outdoor nature, etc. The research results provide suggestions and knowledge for rural restaurant managers and designers through human-oriented needs from the perspective of consumers, and clarify the preferences and expectations of different consumer groups for rural restaurant landscapes while achieving the goal of rural landscape protection.