Development of Cultural Ecosystem Services Contributes to a Plural Perspective for Human-Nature Studies —Interview With Tobias Plieninger

Abstract

Tobias Plieninger has contributed to framing Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) by his studies in Europe and Asia from forest to agricultural ecosystems. He introduced how the term of CES as a part of ecosystem services was raised by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment but largely neglected at the beginning. From his projects, he explored how to set up indicators and the development of a method Public Participation Geographic Information Systems to map cultural values in landscapes for CES assessment. Because of the limitation of CES, the new inclusive concepts like Nature’s Contributions to People arose. Plieninger gave us his perspective about the new tendency to use social media data to broaden the research scale, and shared his opinions about CES research in developing countries, like India and China. He suggested people should apply the methods not only in technocratic or purely in academic exercises, but to deal with real-world problems. He encouraged the young generation to further explore the frontier topics such as the role of CES in increasingly unstable times.