"Transplanetary" perspective of cultural ecosystem services - Extending Dickinson and Hobbs (2017)'s definitions, characteristics and challenges of cultural services' research

In their review, Dickinson and Hobbs (2017) ensemble a set of critiques on the notion, characteristics, and challenges of cultural ecosystem services (CES) and respective research. Concurrently, Costanza et al. (2017) provide a throughout overview on the last "Twenty years of ecosystem services". Inspired by their narratives, we advance thought on the existence of further challenges in CES research, relating with the possibility that space missions motivate innovative human-ecosystem interactions, and therefore, novel co-productions of CES. This is mainly because humans, as observers, are increasingly being shifted beyond the Earth's orbit. Examples include Earth's admiration by people on-board orbital crafts, or through the lens of satellite imagery. This "transplanetary" perspective challenges the conceptualization and characterization of CES. It recognises CES as co-productions of both humans and the Earth, which can still be immaterial, incommensurable or valued (monetarily or not). It is further characterised by being time-specific, since different time moments in Earth observation can promote distinct human-environment co-productions. Though it is a matter of time for research efforts to expand into the interplanetary dimension of CES, the roads ahead in this journey might bring exciting research questions. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.