Fundamentally valued: The stability of cultural ecosystem service clusters across diverse urban national park sites

Authors: Chris Zajchowski, Madelyn Cottrell, Anna Medlin, Paige Fery, Jeff Rose

Abstract

Urban parks and protected areas offer a variety of cultural ecosystem services (CES) or nonmarket benefits humans derive from nature. We inventoried CES at the George Washington Memorial Parkway, a U.S. National Park Service unit forming a linear 25-mile transportation corridor that features rich cultural, natural, and recreational values and sits directly adjacent to the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Stratified, on-site visitor and QR code sampling across 18 locations within the Parkway yielded visitor data (n = 965) affording an analysis of CES distribution. Factor analyses then explored grouping services and zip code data allowed for spatial comparison of CES importance. Study results indicate Fundamental and Enrichment CES bundles that highlight relatively stable and disproportionately weighted benefits visitors perceived across sites. Additionally, spatial findings reinforce the importance of proximity of residence for realizing highly-prioritized CES. Findings assist park management in further advocating for the diverse benefits visitors receive from their activities outside of the park’s automobile-focused transit corridor, as well as share how the geographic distribution of visitors alters their valuation of park attributes. Further, results suggest a need for replication of CES clustering across other urban and non-urban national park sites to understand transferability across contexts.

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