Social-ecological dynamics of quarry restoration: a Flickr data analysis

With increasing urbanization and demand for construction materials, quarries have become central to the recovery of degraded landscapes into spaces that offer ecological, but also social benefits. While ecological restoration has long been investigated, integrated social-ecological restoration of post-mining landscapes remains underexplored. The overall aim of this study is to assess the perceptions of cultural ecosystem services and landscape features expressed in social media posts about quarries in Germany, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. We focus on concepts of cultural ecosystem services and landscape features to investigate the interactions between humans and restored ecosystems. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed 1,660 geotagged photographs from 50 quarries across three regions: Berlin, Roskilde, and the Czech Karst. Flickr social media images were analyzed to elicit the richness of cultural ecosystem services (CES) and landscape features (LF), highlighting popular quarries and their social-ecological significance. Our results indicate that rehabilitated quarries exhibit higher CES richness than abandoned or operational ones, and that accessibility significantly influences public engagement. Our study demonstrates that once primarily industrial sites, quarries can evolve into vibrant social-ecological systems that provide diverse landscape features and cultural ecosystem services. It also points to the potential of social media data for designing restoration efforts from a social-ecological perspective. Such an approach provides insights into public perceptions of restored landscapes and may inform future restoration strategies. 

 This dataset includes: (1) the review protocol, (2) a list of place names used for data collection on Flickr when posts were not geolocated, (3) data on landscape features and cultural ecosystem services identified in Flickr posts from 50 study quarries, (4) characteristics of the quarries, and (5) a shapefile of the quarry polygons.