The world’s forests, and the biodiversity they contain, provide multiple cultural ecosystem services that are essential to people’s well-being. However, interactions between people and forests evolve alongside broader societal and environmental change, raising questions about whether the values associated with forest cultural ecosystem services have shifted over time. To examine this, we conducted a global meta-analysis of 137 economic valuation studies comprising 705 observations gathered over the four decades between 1980 and 2019. Our results did not provide evidence of statistically significant temporal trends for travel cost, contingent valuation, choice experiment, or hedonic pricing estimates. Likewise, a recreation-only subsample did not provide evidence of a statistically significant temporal trend in monetary values over time. Although a diversity of cultural ecosystem service classes and forest types were examined, the existing evidence base is biased towards high-income countries, and valuation studies remain heavily concentrated on recreational interactions with forests, while spiritual and symbolic interactions are rarely quantified. Such gaps in our knowledge limit our ability to quantify the monetary value of forest cultural ecosystem services globally. Although we did not find evidence of temporal trends in the value people place on forest cultural ecosystem services, the substantial heterogeneity and method-specific patterns observed in our models suggest that temporal stability should not be assumed when undertaking benefit transfers. Given these findings, methodological heterogeneity and contextual differences should be considered when applying benefit transfer methods in environmental decision-making. The scarcity of studies in low- and middle-income countries, combined with a strong focus on recreation, underscores the need for broader and geographically diverse valuation research. Addressing these gaps may support more context-sensitive approaches to forest management and conservation.

Pathways to sustainability require a broader and fuller representation of the multiple values of nature in policy and practice. In this People and Nature special feature entitled ‘The Multiple Values of Nature’, researchers interpreted all three key words differently: multiple, values and nature. The articles also engaged variously with concepts, theory, practice and data. In the face of this diversity, some see a burgeoning field and others see a mess. In this editorial, we characterize the diversity of these contributions and consider whether the field is poised to become mainstream. Specifically, we ask what might be limiting its efforts to unsettle the dominance of economic valuation. Like the broader field, the articles engage little with theory, and only one paper engaged with a theory of value (the dominant ‘utility theory’, rejecting a component of it). All articles thus seemed dissatisfied or disengaged with existing theories of value; this suggests that popular theories of value cannot properly account for the diversity of ways that people value and relate to nature. Perhaps there is a fundamental lack in how we understand value in any context (not just nature). As this fledgling field matures, we argue that building theory is key. Specifically, there is a need to articulate a theory of value to accommodate the multiple values of nature, which relates the various concepts to empirics, and which serves as a foundation to guide practice. To facilitate this theory development, we outline a set of ways that a new theory of value would need to differ from the dominant economic (utility) theory of value in order to explain what is known about the multiple values of nature. Whether by illustrating and enlivening an existing alternative theory of value or by inspiring a new theory, perhaps this fledgling field of the multiple values of nature is poised to disrupt much broader understandings of what matters to people and why. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

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Abstract Listening is a pervasive and significant act of conservation research and praxis, mattering greatly for the realisation of conservation agendas, not least its ambitions to be outward looking and inclusive in approach. Yet, the value and role of listening has been barely explored in a sustained and reflexive way. This paper is a preliminary schematic of what it might mean to attend to the act of listening, set within the context of a larger field of listening scholarship as well as more specific manoeuvres to embed relational approaches into the study of people and nature interactions. We explore what it means to 'listen well' within the context of conservation, highlighting the importance of recognising listening as a relationship and our positions and power within those relationships; the need to care for the relationship through respect and empathy; and the building of inclusive relationships of listening by attending to how space and time influences understanding. We offer examples of how researchers and practitioners can create spaces for listening, illustrating our discussion with personal reflections about listening practices gained through our various conservation and research careers. We provide approaches and ideas which help the reader—academic and practitioner—to both understand and articulate the value of listening in conservation and relational values of nature. We hope to inspire the wider use of listening‐based approaches in conservation research and practice, and the recognition and support from senior managers and funders of what is needed to promote long‐term and meaningful relationships between people and nature. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

It is now 3 years since People and Nature was launched as the British Ecological Society's journal of relational thinking. Since that formative and auspicious moment, the Journal has published over 160 papers exploring critical linkages between, and assemblages of, these highly interdependent, if not co-constructed, worlds of ‘people’ and ‘nature’. We wrote in the opening editorial of the motivation and opportunity for conducting broadly defined interdisciplinary research, and emphatically of the need to sustain and foster creative dialogues between ecology and other disciplines to elaborate understandings of people and nature both critical by design and applied in scope. Given the many and diverse submissions that have arisen from this invitation, it seems warranted to now ask, what is the emerging signature of our relational journal? Thus, what kinds of topics and themes have come to preoccupy its work? What models of interdisciplinarity are shaping its approaches to inquiry? And, what kinds of relational thinking are duly emerging? In offering some initial answers to these questions, our concern is less to say what People and Nature is or is not as a Journal—still less to prescribe and narrow the types of articles we now welcome—but rather, to characterise our current trajectory while renewing and insisting on our commitment to innovations that draw from varied arenas of knowledge production. We have only just started. People and Nature was launched as a broad-scope journal, suggesting a willingness to explore the idea of nature through a variety of conceptual and empirical lenses. As befits the Journal's academic provenance, ‘ecology’, ‘biodiversity’ and ‘wildlife’ feature prominently in how nature is constructed and understood. Within this, a focus on people within the plight and fate of species—from hen harriers to shortfin mako sharks—has provided one focus (French et al., 2019; Gibbs et al., 2020; St John et al., 2019). The categories of ‘environment’, ‘landscape’ and ‘seascape’ have more generally emerged as surrogates for the natural world, as have the generic categories of ‘green’ and ‘blue’ space, arguably pointing to the broader disciplinary origins of published work. What counts as a venue for the study of people–nature relations is consequently diverse in scale, extent and geographical focus. Work has encompassed the study of protected areas of high biodiversity value (Martinez-Harms et al., 2021) alongside the study of extensive and monolithic agricultural landscapes (Case et al., 2020). It has interrogated the urban nature of the mega-city (Oh et al., 2021) and the cultural landscapes of the garden (Teuber, 2021). It has explored vast stretches of the open sea (Blenckner et al., 2021; Fleming et al., 2019) alongside the micro worlds of the river corridor (Leigh et al., 2019). And it has encompassed the study of nature both near and far: the nearby nature of the local park and woodland (Austen et al., 2021; Hoyle et al., 2019); the hidden and mysterious nature of the ocean floor and; the luminous nature of the moon in the night sky (Kaikkonen & van Putten, 2021). Such is our emerging emphasis on plurality when accounting for nature. But what of the plurality of the ‘people’ of People and Nature? In the published record, we find a natural world that is imagined, shaped, managed and occupied by an array of human actors, inter alia: farmers, hunters, traders, fishers, anglers, divers, beekeepers, game keepers, bird watchers, forest dwellers, urban residents, lay people, experts, scientists, indigenous communities, children, rangers, pastoralists, conservationists, hobbyists, enthusiasts, pet owners, gamers, gardeners, consumers, artists, filmmakers, urban planners and policymakers. And as central protagonists in the empirical life of People and Nature, the thoughts, perspectives, practices, values and behaviour of people enter the fray of the Journal in a variety of data guises—as responses in a survey; as words in an interview or focus group; as represented subjects of an ethnography; and as observed behaviours in experiments. In pulling these human and non-human worlds together, the Journal has also partly emerged as a venue for advancing a social-ecological systems view of people–nature relations, with harmonising approaches to natural resource management—such as ecosystem services, nature's benefits to people, nature-based solutions—acting as prominent conceptual and analytical starting points for study (e.g. Berdejo-Espinola et al., 2021; Hinson et al., 2022; Thogmartin et al., 2022). These system frameworks carry with them the ambition of creating highly integrative scenarios-based analyses of people–nature relationships, often with a strong economic and institutional dimension. At the same time, the study of a material nature ‘out there’ is starting to be folded into the study of wider circuits of culture. Critical and synoptic treatments of the framing and staging of different natures across a variety of mass media, and their various effects on peoples' values, attitudes, behaviours and practices, has been an emerging focus. Critic-driven analysis of conventional media content—from the wildlife documentary to the horror film—now sit alongside efforts to understand how nature is articulated and performed through the hyper-realities of the online game and the technologically enabled worlds of the smartphone ( Boissat et al., 2021; Chiacchio & Pigoni, 2022; Crowley et al., 2021). Researchers of People and Nature are increasingly as likely to be researchers of the screenscape as they are the landscape or the seascape. As we assemble around the gamified worlds of Red Dead Redemption 2, scrutinise the Twitter feed, and make sense of the Instagram post, the question of where nature ‘ends’ and culture ‘begins’ is increasingly a moot point. The future of People and Nature is not one where we seek to clarify, still less police, these distinctions between the human and natural worlds, but rather a future where we seek better to understand and interrogate the consequences of a world becoming more hybridised. We might say this evident fascination with mediated natures signifies a broader commitment to interpretative research, and thus a decisive move towards the social sciences and humanities in making sense of people–nature relations. This move is further evidenced by the maturing of work in the area of cultural ecosystem services, a recurring area of publication (Egarter Vigl et al., 2021; Gould et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2022) as well as the gradual treatment and application of concepts more familiar to critical theory researchers, among these discourse and metaphor analysis and the study of environmental aesthetics. People and Nature was launched as a venue for interdisciplinary research. The prominence we have given to interdisciplinarity is partly a function of the thematic scope of our work: researching the relations between the human and non-human worlds invites us to go beyond strong, but ultimately compartmentalised, forms of mono- and multi-disciplinary knowledge. As a journal growing out of the natural sciences, we pointed to the way ecology could be put in conversation with a diverse range of disciplines from across the social sciences and humanities: economics, geography, indigenous studies, history, law, literature, medicine, philosophy, politics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Interdisciplinarity thus remains something of a first principle in this Journal's efforts to recognise and grapple with the messy, uncertain, complex and entangled relations of the human and non-human realms; the placement of ecology in a larger social realm. Yet, it remains the case that disciplinary knowledge still matters greatly to an overall assessment of the originality, significance and rigour of work submitted to the Journal and how an audience for that work is built upon publication. People and Nature may well be a venue for interdisciplinarity, but it cannot avoid scrutiny by the disciplinary traditions, expectations, preferences and preoccupations that bear witness to it, not only our readers, but also as editors and reviewers. We neither wish to suppress or ignore these multiple disciplinary predilections. In fact, it is only through this scrutiny by disciplines that novelty, importance and quality of our published research are shaped and regulated, not simply asserted. It is also how boundaries and viable boundary crossings between disciplines can become evident. In the same vein, we do not seek to ‘straight-jacket’ research into a People and Nature version of interdisciplinarity. The emerging tendency is towards multi-authored, mix-specialist teams, typically straddling the natural and social sciences and conducting work of applied nature. It is thus worth reiterating that People and Nature also invites and welcomes critical and creative single-authored scholarship. It invites and welcomes contributions that are interdisciplinary within as well as between the social and natural sciences. And it invites and welcomes contributions that contribute to theoretical and conceptual advancement. [join] the few languages we have, from the life sciences and elsewhere, for dealing with the present ecological mess. A new sense of the fragility of the world, as a bio-physical-social entity, accompanies a new necessity to apprehend the interdependence of entities and beings of all kinds. An appeal to ‘relations’ is crisp and all-embracing. Indeed, it is relations all the way down. When we consider matters of people and nature from the perspective of relations, it is likely that many of us would have in mind the study of interactions. Interactionalism, as we might term it, provides a significant, arguably deeply intuitive, way of conceiving of relations across diverse modes of inquiry. For example, relational understanding of people and nature might be taken to mean empirical study of the interactions between particular components of the social and physical world—the farmer negotiating the extensive landscape, the urban resident recreating in the park—and so forth. However, the idea of relationality goes further than interactionalism. Whereas interactions are commonly understood as taking place between beings and things that pre-exist those interactions (in what is sometimes called a ‘substance ontology’), relational thinking involves recognising a deeper set of entanglements (Hertz et al., 2020; Todd, 2014). Specifically, in this sense, relationality allows that entities do not exist before they are in relationship; rather their separate existence at any point in time is a snapshot of a deep and dynamic set of relations with other entities over space and time. By these process or relational ontologies, the relations are primary, and entities as a category on their own are secondary. Clearly, we do not pre-exist our interactions with nature: our relations with nature today are a product of our coevolution with thousands of species, including microbes, companion animals and livestock, predators, and ecosystems, situated in social relations and contexts. Judging by the published record, it is interactionalism that has, to date defined the relational thinking of People and Nature. We continue to welcome manuscripts that will surely focus on such interactions, but we are also keen to go further, to fully grapple with these wider and deeper manifestations of relational thinking. It is, as Strathern (2018) insists, relations all the way down.

Participatory approaches are widely used by researchers to gather data and insight about how the environment is perceived, valued and used. The participatory activities may be creating information as part of curiosity-driven blue-skies research or to inform policy/practise decision-making. The quality and usability of data derived from participatory approaches are heavily influenced by how activities are conducted. We share a set of features and processes that underpin the generation of high-quality data, based on our collective experience of developing and undertaking participatory activities with an environmental and conservation focus. We propose four general features: (a) Depth and breadth of engagement; (b) robustness of the approach; (c) allowing space for surprises; (d) usability across contexts. We also provide a practical toolbox of processes, and associated facilitation techniques, which can be employed to maximise participant engagement and generate quality data. The features and processes are a practical guide for project leaders/teams to consider in the context of their work, rather than a set of inflexible rules. They should be relevant regardless of the participatory methods used, or the research, policy or practice setting being addressed.

Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was published, a plethora of ecosystem service frameworks have been developed to conceptualise the links between the natural environment and society. The intended geographic scales of application, the policy/practice context, and the scientific disciplines involved have driven variations in how the frameworks are constructed. However, the frameworks are homogenous in that they have been created predominately based on expert opinions and views of how ecosystem services are structured. Here, we use the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) to examine the extent to which frameworks capture people’s values for British woodlands. Our findings reveal several disparities between how experts and the public conceptualise ecosystem services. The considerable refinement and specificity provided by CICES does not align with public values (e.g. some provisioning, and regulation and maintenance, services), which tend to be more generalised. We also demonstrate differences in values explained by social characteristics (e.g. ethnicity) that need to be accounted for in decision-making processes. Moving forwards, we need to consider how society views the services derived from nature and reflect this in frameworks to ensure ecosystem service approaches are effective, transparent and widely supported.

This paper examines how young people come to be enrolled and engaged in programmes of unpaid environmental conservation in rural areas. Set within a theoretical debate regarding the nature of unpaid work and its relationship to voluntary and coercive forms of environmental action, the paper identifies four pathways and two types of recipient organisations through which young people become involved in efforts to protect and enhance rural landscapes and locales. Drawing on a combination of extended survey and in-depth qualitative research in the west and south of rural England, the paper considers the systems of governance that surround the organisation of these unpaid activities and shows how these are rationalised and designed as practical and embodied experiences of citizenship. The paper argues that enhancing participation rests less on how to foster more young participants into the conservation sector than how to structure these activities in more productive ways that go beyond simple ‘sweat equity’. The findings have implications for the training and organisation of volunteers in other sectors.

Recent high-profile analyses of trajectories and prognoses of ecosystem decline around the world have called for a renewed focus on embedding the values of the natural world across all areas of public policy. This paper reports the results of a UK-based deliberative process involving experts from a wide range of policy domains and across societal sectors: government departments, associated agencies, national and international NGOs, professional institutions, academia and independent experts. A symposium, based on a collaborative learning approach, explored instances in which ecosystem values have successfully been embedded into public policy, identified challenges to their more widespread embedding despite commitments to do so over generational timescales, and took a backcasting approach to develop actionable outcomes required to deliver transformation change across state and civil society. Emergent themes were expressed in social, technological, environmental, economic and political terms. Recommendations for interventions in complex social-ecological systems are cross-sectoral in scope and will necessarily entail multiple agents of change, well beyond governmental leadership, within any given sphere of societal activity and interest. We identify strategic challenges for, and between, a spectrum of societal policy areas, many currently overlooking ecosystem dependencies, impacts and potential benefits. Reflections on the collaborative learning approach are also provided.

The vital importance of nature to people, and of people to the future of that nature, is self-evident. The understanding of those linkages is, nonetheless, being critically transformed and enriched by research that transcends the barriers between ecology and other traditional disciplines. Such studies are not new, but the dramatic growth in their number and influence is, and reflects the growing need for such work in rapidly changing times and circumstances. People and Nature is founded upon a recognition of these developments, and of the need of authors and readers for a journal that is focussed on them. The motivation and opportunity to conduct interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research involving ecology and related disciplines has blossomed in recent years (from this point on, we use interdisciplinary research as a catch-all also including cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research, while recognising that these can refer to markedly different things). It is increasingly understood that knowledge of the interactions between people and nature is crucial to both. There is a need to sustain and foster creative dialogues between ecology and a host of other disciplines in order to elaborate understandings of people and nature that are both critical and applied in scope. This means dialogues across the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. People and Nature is a venue (and invitation) for disciplinary engagements that encompass, for example, economics, geography, history, law, literature, medicine, philosophy, politics, psychology, and sociology, as well as other related disciplines. The British Ecological Society has added new titles to its family of journals as the field of ecology has developed, with the establishment of Journal of Ecology in 1913, Journal of Animal Ecology in 1932, Journal of Applied Ecology in 1964, Functional Ecology in 1987, and Methods in Ecology and Evolution in 2010. People and Nature is a further extension of this highly successful approach. While these other internationally significant journals, and most conspicuously Journal of Applied Ecology, have published papers at the interface of ecology and other disciplines, the focus has been on ecology itself, and thus viewing interdisciplinary scholarship as the adjunct of questions that are fundamentally ecological in intent. People and Nature takes a rather broader view, which can loosely be characterised as a requirement that all contributions have something meaningful to say both about the “People” and the “Nature” components of its title. Breaking down the barriers between disciplines brings its own challenges to authors, reviewers, and readers of articles. Although People and Nature presumes and encourages conversations across quite different arenas of knowledge production, this ambition can encounter remarkably durable disciplinary wisdoms about how research should be framed. People and Nature is committed to working to minimise the challenges associated with disciplinary difference. First, we feel strongly that researchers doing high-quality work should be able to expect a professional, respectful, and constructive publishing experience regardless of their disciplinary norms. We strive to welcome and evaluate every submission on its own terms; we cannot promise to “get it” on first read, but we can promise to try. We recognise that a large proportion of work within the scope of People and Nature is undertaken by researchers from disciplines beyond ecology, sometimes this is in collaboration with ecologists, but often it is not. Our ethos is inclusive and we have set up our submission, peer review, and publication processes with a number of features to ensure our journal caters to different needs. Importantly, we welcome conceptual and empirical research and we do not prioritise one over the other. All research styles have an important role to play when addressing issues within our scope. Relatedly, we are not prescriptive when it comes to word limits or section headings. Of course, our editorial board will assess manuscript formats for appropriateness but we recognise that different disciplines have different conventions and norms and therefore do not ask authors to conform to arbitrary word limits or fixed structures. Second, when scoping the journal, we heard from a lot of researchers who had experienced painful review processes for their interdisciplinary work. We commit to being a leading light of interdisciplinary editing and peer review. It can be difficult for journal editors to make decisions on interdisciplinary work that is often necessarily reviewed by people working in very different spheres. Understandably, reviewers tend to comment more critically on aspects of work with which they are most familiar and provide fewer comments on aspects they know less about. This can be problematic for authors who, for example, use mixed methodologies. The editorial board we recruited is intimately familiar with interdisciplinary research and peer review, and has the tools and the confidence to make active and fair editorial decisions. The editors know that interpreting differences of opinions from contrasting peer reviews takes work, both for ourselves and for authors, but it is crucial to ensure that People and Nature articles can speak across boundaries. Further to this, in recognition of the splintering of largely separate conversations in different niche (but often interdisciplinary) journals, we are working with authors to ensure that their papers actively speak to a range of relevant fields and disciplines. People and Nature thus aspires to be not a collection of unlike contributions to different literatures, but rather the nexus where these various literatures about human-nature relationships convene. This aspiration will take years to achieve, and steering from an editorial team expert in interdisciplinary integration. For this reason and its own sake, a diversity of voices on our growing editorial board is key: our Associate Editors currently hail from 18 countries and innumerable fields and disciplines, with a 46%:54% male:female gender balance. As well as ensuring that the editorial board has the right tools to make objective decisions, we have introduced two important additions to our peer review process. We ask reviewers to specify in their reports which aspects of a manuscript they are most comfortable assessing. This is a small, but important, way to help handling editors assess reviews in their proper context. When we have received the required number of reviews on a manuscript, all of the comments to the authors are then passed first to all reviewers who are invited to enter into a conversation on fellow reviewers’ reports. We hope that this will draw out disciplinary differences in reviews and help editors to ensure that any requested revisions to manuscripts are appropriate. Third, while the primary audience of our journal will be academic researchers, we recognise that topics within our scope are of importance to practitioners and policymakers, and we want to ensure that we actively engage with them. We welcome submissions from these groups and our Perspective article type is particularly suited to non-academic audiences. Access to primary research is a perennial problem for those who do not work for an academic institution and this is one reason we decided that the Journal would be fully open access—all articles are published under a CC-BY licence, free to read, and reuse. We also recognise that such a broad scope will in turn have a very broad readership and we hope that people will engage with all of our content, whether or not it is from their discipline. To facilitate this, like one of our sister BES journals, Functional Ecology, all articles have a plain language summary published alongside them as part of their supporting information. We recognise the international nature of research within our scope and, like all the BES journals, allow authors to publish their abstract in another language of their choice alongside the English abstract. In general, as a BES journal we benefit from a dedicated and highly experienced in-house editorial office team, giving us the ability to provide a level of service and additional promotion for authors that is unavailable to many journals. Early interest in the journal has been excellent and, in order to help ensure fast publication for our authors, content is being published as soon as it is ready and will subsequently be collected into balanced issues published quarterly. We hope our first volume will help set the agenda in this interdisciplinary space, and that subsequent volumes will expand it further. As People and Nature develops, we will endeavour to learn from, and adapt, our processes to provide the best interdisciplinary publication experience that we can for authors, reviewers and readers. We cannot do this in isolation. We want to build a community around this exciting new venture. We have welcomed pre-submission enquiries since before we opened for submissions, and we are still happy to provide feedback to potential authors before they submit. We also welcome feedback from the community more broadly. Do you have suggestions to improve our peer review process or article layout, for example? Is your subject area not represented on our editorial board? If you have any feedback do get in touch with our office. To foster a two-way conversation we have established a blog (which includes all of our plain language summaries of papers) and a Twitter feed, and encourage discussion and debate within the journal’s pages. Please join us on this journey.

The Valuing Nature Network aims to improve understanding of the value of nature in both economic and non-economic terms, and improve the use of these valuations in decision making. It funds interdisciplinary research and builds links between researchers and people who make decisions that affect nature in business, policy-making, and in practice. The Global Challenges Research Fund aims to support research that directly contributes to the sustainable development and welfare of people in developing countries. • A review of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (see Annex I) and their targets revealed a number of themes that have links to the Valuing Nature Network research agenda, specifically: the governance of natural resources; conservation of natural capital and sustainable use of ecosystems; environmentally, socially and economically sustainable agro-forestry systems; and knowledge exchange at the science-policy interface. Assessing the extent and depth of existing research in these areas, and identifying networks of current research collaboration, can enable the identification of key opportunities for advancing research into the natural environment that also seeks to address the challenges associated with international development.

A study of the cultural ecosystem services (CES) arising from peoples’ interactions with the rural environment is conducted within the context of a landscape scale, ‘nature improvement’ initiative in the United Kingdom. Taking a mixed methodological approach, the research applies, and demonstrates empirically, a framework for CES developed under the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (Fish et al., 2016). Applications of the framework involve the study of the ‘environmental spaces’ and ‘cultural practices’ that contribute to the realisation of benefits to well-being. In this paper empirical work is undertaken to inform the CES evidence base informing management priorities of the Northern Devon Nature Improvement Area (NDNIA) in south west England. Findings from a questionnaire survey, qualitative mapping, group discussion and a participatory arts-based research process are presented to document the many and diverse ways this study area matters to local communities. The paper analyses the qualities that research participants attribute to the environmental space of the NDNIA, the cultural practices conducted and enabled within it, and their associated benefits. The implications of the study for applying this framework through mixed methodological research are discussed, alongside an account of the impact of this approach within the NDNIA itself.

The construction of culture as a class of ecosystem service presents a significant test of the holistic ambitions of an ecosystems approach to decision making. In this paper we explore the theoretical challenges arising from efforts to understand ecosystems as objects of cultural concern and consider the operational complexities associated with understanding how, and with what consequences, knowledge about cultural ecosystem services are created, communicated and accounted for in real world decision making. We specifically forward and develop a conceptual framework for understanding cultural ecosystem services and related benefits in terms of the environmental spaces and cultural practices that arise from interactions between humans and ecosystems. The types of knowledge, and approaches to knowledge production, presumed by this relational, non-linear and place-based perspective on cultural ecosystem services are discussed and reviewed. The framework not only helps navigate more fully the challenge of operationalising ‘cultural ecosystem services’ but points to a more relational understanding of the ecosystem services framework as a whole. Extending and refining understanding through more ambitious engagements in interdisciplinarity remains important.

The substantial importance of cultural benefits as a source of human well-being is increasingly recognised in society-environment interactions. The integration of cultural ecosystem services (CES) into the ecosystem services framework remains a challenge due to the difficulties associated with defining, articulating and measuring CES. We operationalise a novel framework developed by the UK National Ecosystem Assessment that identifies CES as the interactions between environmental spaces (i.e. physical localities or landscapes), and the activities that occur there. We evaluate the benefits of the CES provided by 151 UK marine sites to recreational sea anglers and divers, using subjective well-being indicators. Factor analysis of an online questionnaire with 1220 participants revealed multiple CES benefits that contribute to human wellbeing e.g. including ‘engagement with nature’, ‘place identity’ and ‘therapeutic value’. In addition to regional differences, we also found that biophysical attributes of sites, such as the presence of charismatic species and species diversity, were positively associated with provision of CES benefits. The study provides evidence that could be used to inform designation of protected areas. The indicators used in the study may also be adapted for use across a range of marine and terrestrial spaces for improved integration of CES in environmental decision-making.

Social valuation of ecosystem services and public policy alternatives is one of the greatest challenges facing ecological economists today. Frameworks for valuing nature increasingly include shared/social values as a distinct category of values. However, the nature of shared/social values, as well as their relationship to other values, has not yet been clearly established and empirical evidence about the importance of shared/social values for valuation of ecosystem services is lacking. To help address these theoretical and empirical limitations, this paper outlines a framework of shared/social values across five dimensions: value concept, provider, intention, scale, and elicitation process. Along these dimensions we identify seven main, non-mutually exclusive types of shared values: transcendental, cultural/societal, communal, group, deliberated and other-regarding values, and value to society. Using a case study of a recent controversial policy on forest ownership in England, we conceptualise the dynamic interplay between shared/social and individual values. The way in which social value is assessed in neoclassical economics is discussed and critiqued, followed by consideration of the relation between shared/social values and Total Economic Value, and a review of deliberative and non-monetary methods for assessing shared/social values. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of shared/social values for decision-making.

An introductory guide for CSFOs and their delivery partners.Report to the Environment Agency.