Determining preferences for ecosystem benefits in Great Lakes Areas of Concern from photographs posted to social media.

ABSTRACT: Relative valuation of potentially affected ecosystem benefits can increase the legitimacy and social acceptance of ecosystem restoration projects. As an alternative or supplement to traditional methods of deriving beneficiary preference, we downloaded from social media and classified ≈21,000 photographs taken in two Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOC), the St. Louis River and the Milwaukee Estuary. Our motivating presumption was that the act of taking a photograph constitutes some measure of the photographer's individual preference for, or choice of, the depicted subject matter among myriad possible subject matter. Overall, 17% of photos downloaded from the photo-sharing sites Flickr, Instagram, and Panoramio depicted an ecosystem benefit of the AOC. Percent of photographs depicting a benef

SUBMITTER: Angradi TR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6002155 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature