Tourism, landscapes and cultural ecosystem services: a new research tool

This research note presents a new tool for analysing the benefits of landscapes for visitors and tourists using the Cultural Ecosystems Services (CES) framework as defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) in 2005. The authors reflect on the challenges of defining Cultural Ecosystem Services and interpreting and translating these categorisations for the purposes of questionnaire research. Previous studies had noted the difficulties inherent in capturing many of the intangible elements inherent in the CES terminology. Familiarisation with CES categories arguably affords new opportunities to bring together many of the disparate elements which have often been managed independently in landscape and tourism studies (e.g. cultural and intangible heritage, eco-systems, socio-cultural impacts of tourism and community-based tourism). A questionnaire was designed consisting of nineteen statements which related closely to the CES categorisations. It was translated into eight languages and distributed in autumn 2015 to visitors in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Macedonia, Netherlands and Poland in six different kinds of landscape: forest, mountains, lakeside, seaside, mountains, desert and a combination of nature and manmade. In total, 876 valid questionnaires were obtained and were proven statistically to make a useful contribution to the field of CES research, landscapes and tourism studies.