A comparative approach to assess the contribution of landscape features to aesthetic and recreational values in agricultural landscapes

Boris T. van Zanten, Ingo Zasada, Mark J. Koetse, Fabrizio Ungaro, Kati Häfner and Peter H. Verburg

Ecosystem Services, 2016, vol. 17, issue C, 87-98

Abstract: The importance of cultural ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes is increasingly recognized as agricultural scale enlargement and abandonment affect aesthetic and recreational values of agricultural landscapes. Landscape preference studies addressing these type of values often yield context-specific outcomes, limiting the applicability of their outcomes in landscape policy. Our approach measures the relative importance of landscape features across agricultural landscapes. This approach was applied in the agricultural landscapes of Winterswijk, The Netherlands (n=191) and the Märkische Schweiz, Germany (n=113) among visitors in the agricultural landscape. We set up a parallel designed choice experiment, using regionally specific, photorealistic visualizations of four comparable landscape attributes. In the Dutch landscape visitors highly value hedgerows and tree lines, whereas groups of trees and crop diversity are highly valued in the German landscape. Furthermore, we find that differences in relative preference for landscape attributes are, to some extent, explained by socio-cultural background variables such as education level and affinity with agriculture of the visitors. This approach contributes to a better understanding of the cross-regional variation of aesthetic and recreational values and how these values relate to characteristics of the agricultural landscape, which could support the integration of cultural services in landscape policy.

Keywords: Cultural ecosystem services; Landscape preferences; Comparative study; Landscape aesthetics; Landscape values; Agricultural landscape (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041615300619
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoser:v:17:y:2016:i:c:p:87-98

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2015.11.011

Access Statistics for this article

Ecosystem Services is currently edited by Leon C Braat

More articles in Ecosystem Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().