O papel das áreas protegidas na proteção dos serviços ecossistêmicos culturais do litoral brasileiro

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) are a key tool for conserving nature while generating a cascade of social and economic benefits. In Brazil, political changes are likely to result in a drastic decrease in investments for nature conservation. One way to ensure investment in PAs in the face of such threats is to clearly demonstrate the cultural benefits generated by these areas. To this end we use an innovative machine-learning approach to automatically identify, classify and quantify the cultural ecosystem services (CES) represented in thousands of digital photos taken along the Brazilian coast and uploaded onto a popular file-sharing network. Our results indicate that photos taken inside PAs portray, on average, more CES (per photo and per user) than photos from outside of PAs. Moreover, there was a higher frequency of CES portrayed in photos taken in December and January and during weekends. Distance from large urban centers was most associated with photos portraying social recreation. Despite some limitations, our method appears to be suitable for quantifying and comparing a range of CES (especially aesthetic appreciation and recreation) at large geographic scales. At finer spatial scales,our approach can provide important information about the preferences of users ofnatural areas, and could therefore serve as a valuable support tool for environmental planning and decision making.