Cultural ecosystem services evaluation using geolocated social media data: a review

Cultural Ecosystem Service (CES) evaluation is the basis for various environmental management and policymaking for nature-based tourism destinations including national parks. As an innovative data sourcing method, geolocated social media data promotes the rapid growth in CES research. Based on 58 empirical research articles using geolocated social media data, we review the current status and challenges of CES research and suggest some future CES research directions. We find that current geolocated social media based quantitative CES evaluation studies concentrate in photo density analysis, quantitative analysis of photo contents, photo viewshed analysis and economic values analysis. We also find that factors affecting CES spatial and temporal distributions fall in two major categories: biophysical and social/infrastructure. We think that future CES research can be improved by theoretical extension, methodological integration and service co-creation.