Harnessing Artificial Intelligence technology and social media data to support Cultural Ecosystem Service assessments

Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES), such as aesthetic and recreational enjoyment, as well as sense of place and cultural heritage, play an outstanding role in the contribution of landscapes to human well-being. Scientists, however, still often struggle to understand how landscape characteristics contribute to deliver these intangible benefits, largely because it is hard to navigate how people value nature, and because there is a lack in methods that accommodate both comprehensive and time-efficient evaluations. Recent advances in technology and the proliferation of new data sources, such as social media data, open promising alternatives to traditional, resource intensive methods, facilitating the understanding of the multiple relationships between people and nature. Here, we examine a user-friendly Artificial Intelligence (AI) based approach for inferring visual-sensory landscape values from Flickr data, combining computer vision with text mining. We show it is possible to automatically ...