Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) in landscapes with a tourist vocation: Mapping and modeling the physical landscape components that bring benefits to people in a mountain tourist destination in southeastern Brazil

Abstract

Mapping and modeling non-material benefits such as scenic beauty, heritage, leisure and its associated subjective dimensions raise numerous challenges. There is thus the need to forge new methodological approaches in order to include people’s preferences into tourism planning and management. This work presents a spatially explicit modeling approach to assess and map Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) in landscapes with a tourist vocation. The results show that landscape users (local residents, entrepreneurs and tourists) prefer land covers such as rocky outcrops and Atlantic Forest, which are associated with CES such as aesthetics and recreation/ecotourism. Our results also show that Araucaria and Atlantic Forest are associated to CES hotspots with high degree of multifunctionality. The method we propose likely contributes to advancing the modeling of CES based on the preferences of landscape users. This method can be applied for better management and spatial planning of tourist destinations.