Assessing the inspirational value of cultural ecosystem services based on the Chinese poetry

Inspiration is an essential service within cultural ecosystem services. However, there is little research on the inspirational value due to the limitations of the available data. A large number of Chinese poetries mention a variety of ecological elements that inspired poets' creativity. This collection of poetries is the embodiment of the inspirational cultural ecosystem service and provides a new data source for evaluating the inspirational value of cultural ecosystem services. We established the ecological element diversity index and inspirational value index model to evaluate inspirational service. We investigated the poetry from the West Lake in Hangzhou City and the Yunlong Lake in Xuzhou City, China. The results showed the following: (1) The calculation of the ecological elements yielded four levels. The value of the first level was more than four times that of the fourth level. (2) The inspirational value index of plants is the highest in the classification of the ecological elements, followed by meteorological elements, animals, bodies of water, and topography. (3) Among the specific ecological elements, the wood-inspired value index is the highest, 108,855.24, followed by wind and birds, which are 100,665.80 and 89,305.85, respectively, and 71.05% of the value index is between 0 and 10,000. (4) The inspirational value index of the West Lake is 7076.13, and it is 17.08 for the Yunlong Lake. Therefore, the research method of this study provides a new way to evaluate the inspirational value of cultural ecosystem services.