Background

Cultural ecosystem services are essential for human well-being, yet they are often less researched and inadequately integrated into land-use planning and policy decisions. With increasing environmental changes and pressures on natural landscapes, it is crucial to understand how these changes impact cultural ecosystem services. This is especially true for biodiversity, which plays a key role in supporting cultural services like recreation and tourism. The challenge lies in developing a comprehensive tool that can model these complex interactions and provide actionable insights for both recreational users and land managers.

The Recreation and Biodiversity Cultural Ecosystem Services pDT addresses this challenge by integrating two core modelling components: a recreation potential model to quantify the cultural services provided by physical landscapes and species distribution models (SDMs) to assess the biodiversity component. The pDT leverages advanced modelling techniques to create a dynamic representation of cultural ecosystem services, allowing stakeholders to understand and predict the impacts of environmental changes and management decisions on these services. 

The Recreation Potential Model analyses natural and infrastructure features, such as terrain, land cover, and accessibility, to estimate the suitability of various locations for recreational activities. It creates a recreation potential index that identifies areas with high potential for specific leisure activities based on user preferences, such as 'hard' or 'soft' recreationists.