Spatio-temporal characteristics of cultural ecosystem services and their relations to landscape factors in Hangzhou Xixi National Wetland Park, China

Cultural ecosystem services are important component of ecosystem services which play increasingly important roles in enhancing human well-being. Hangzhou Xixi National Wetland Park (hereafter referred to as Xixi Wetland), the first National Wetland Park of China located in Hangzhou City of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomerations, plays a fundamental, leading and exemplary role in the ecological construction of urban wetland ecosystems. This paper aims to reveal spatio-temporal characteristics of its cultural ecosystem services and their relations to landscape factors. First, the sets of photographs which were uploaded by tourists in 2019 from the two-step website, were used as the data source. Then, we established the corresponding index framework and evaluation model of cultural ecosystem services basing on previous case studies. The social media photo analysis method was used to collect information about the captured images. By means of the ArcGIS software, we visualized the spatial distribution hotspots of different aspects of cultural ecosystem services in Xixi Wetland, and their differences in tourists' perceptions were obtained. Principal component analysis was used to analyze the correlation between cultural ecosystem services and landscape factors. The result showed that most of social media photos were shared to present aesthetic values along with recreation and ecotourism and infrastructure appreciation. Besides, for the landscape elements appearing in the photographs, biological landscape had the highest frequency (40.8%, n = 2667). We found that different types of cultural ecosystem services have different kernel density distributions and perception levels, and also affected by seasonal scales. Besides, there were significant positive spatial correlations between different items of cultural ecosystem services. Among which, the strongest correlations were observed between aesthetic and infrastructure appreciation. In addition, there were spatial correlations between cultural ecosystem services and landscape factors. We concluded that the spatial distribution of cultural ecosystem services in Xixi Wetland presents different patterns under the influence of landscape heterogeneity and seasonal time dimension. There was a correlation between different types of cultural ecosystem services and most landscape factors, indicating that tourists have certain preferences when they perceive cultural ecosystem services.