Assessment of Society’s Perceptions on Cultural Ecosystem Services in a Cultural Landscape in Nanchang, China

Abstract

Ancient villages are a unique landscape of cultural heritage with both tangible and intangible culture, which provide rich ecosystem services for human beings. Assessment of society’s perceptions on cultural heritage landscapes can improve the integration of cultural heritage values into decision-making processes that affect landscapes, thereby contributing to maximizing the benefits people receive from cultural ecosystem services. Based on this premise, a new sense-based hierarchical assessment framework for a cultural landscape of ancient villages in China from the perspectives of experts and the public was developed in this study. Field research was conducted by the experts to preliminarily extract the evaluation indicators by identifying and refining the characteristics of the landscape perception units based on the classification of village’s landscape resources. The public indicators as supplements were determined by the semantic and social networks generated with ROSTCM tool post-processing, which followed crawling public comments on the tourism platforms with Python. The findings indicated that visual stimulation (57.36%) is the strongest, while touch perception is the weakest (3.56%). The proportion of hearing, smell, and taste was 21.52%, 12.05%, and 5.53%, respectively. Furthermore, people consider variety, historicity, culture, and localism as the core themes of perception in their landscape experiences. The value and usefulness of the sensory experiences for cultural landscape assessment and for decision-making in the context of cultural ecosystem services are discussed.