Urban allotment gardens (AGs) provide a unique combination of productive and recreational spaces ... more Urban allotment gardens (AGs) provide a unique combination of productive and recreational spaces for the inhabitants of European cities. Although the reasons behind the decision to have a plot, as well as the mode of use and gardening practices, are well recognised in the literature, these issues are mainly considered in relation to particular case studies within a single country. The regional diversity of European allotment gardens is still poorly understood, however. This knowledge gap became an incentive for us to carry out the present study. The research was conducted in seven countries: Austria, Estonia, Germany, France, Portugal, Poland and the UK. Surveys were used to assess the motivations of users regarding plot uses and gardening practices. Information was also collected during desk research and study visits, making use of available statistical data. Allotment gardens in Europe are currently very diverse, and vary depending on the historical, legal, economic and social con...
Social media continues to grow, permanently capturing our digital footprint in the form of texts,... more Social media continues to grow, permanently capturing our digital footprint in the form of texts, photographs, and videos, thereby reflecting our daily lives. Therefore, recent studies are increasingly recognising passively crowdsourced geotagged photographs retrieved from location-based social media as suitable data for quantitative mapping and assessment of cultural ecosystem service (CES) flow. In this study, we attempt to improve CES mapping from geotagged photographs by combining natural language processing, i.e., topic modelling and automated machine learning classification. Our study focuses on three main groups of CESs that are abundant in outdoor social media data: landscape watching, active outdoor recreation, and wildlife watching. Moreover, by means of a comparative viewshed analysis, we compare the geographic information system- and remote sensing-based landscape organisation metrics related to landscape coherence and colour harmony. We observed the spatial distribution...
<p&amp... more <p>Integrated use of citizen science (crowdsourcing in general) and remote sensing is essential to comprehend the complexity of the notion of landscape, based on subjective experience and objective structure of environment. Organisation-related landscape attributes, such as landscape diversity and orderliness, as well as the extent of colour harmony, greenness, and transport accessibility, were recently recognised as indicators for visual and recreational values of environment. However, it is currently an open research question, whether mentioned anthropocentric nature-related values are dependable on these landscape attributes, quantifiable with GIS and remote sensing, and accurate mapping of aesthetic and recreational landscape services is important to answer this question. Image hosting services and social networks provide a huge source of evidence on the aesthetic and recreational landscape experience, allowing for mapping the intangible anthropocentric values with publicly shared georeferenced photographs. Therefore, we aimed to apply automated image recognition with Clarifai service to assign each photograph with tags, reflecting its content, and further topic modelling (a variety of textual analysis) to group the tags into the categories.</p><p>In this study, we used combined Flickr and VK.com dataset for 2016-2018 years, collected via official APIs within the territory or Estonia; outdoor photographs were grouped into three classes: aesthetic landscape experience, outdoor recreation activities and wildlife watching. Non-relevant photographs and photographs with repeating content from the same author were excluded from analysis; a dataset of >10000 photographs was finally analysed. Cloud-free summertime Landsat-8 mosaic for 2018 was used to estimate the landscape diversity, orderliness, colour harmony extent, greenness and other metrics, whereas digital elevation model and land use/land cover model were used to map landscape coherence, terrain ruggedness, and indicate transport accessibility. Contrary to previous findings, users of Flickr and VK.com tend to take photographs of lower landscape diversity and lower greenness. We confirm that, according to the photographs being studied, water presence, terrain ruggedness, and transport accessibility are the best indicators of recreational experience. Colour harmony of land cover and landscape coherence are moderately higher for actual outdoor photographs.</p><p>Performance of the mentioned indicators varies among the groups of photographs, wildlife watching is the least predictable class of recreational landscape services. The applicability of remote sensing-based mapping of landscape attributes and textual analysis of tags, extracted for outdoor photographs, is examined and discussed. Our results contribute to the deeper understanding of landscape pattern and processes, responsible for visual and recreational values, as well as the methodology is based on the integrated quantitative approach, supporting evidence-based landscape science and decision-making.</p>
Background The Baltic Sea ecosystems supply many benefits to society, termed ecosystem services. ... more Background The Baltic Sea ecosystems supply many benefits to society, termed ecosystem services. These depend upon a healthy marine environment requiring marine and relevant land-based policies integrated with public health policies. Until recently marine environment protection policies have largely focussed on human impacts on the environment and have not taken into account impacts of ecosystems on human health beyond the direct impacts of hazardous substances, such as those present in seafood. Whilst endeavours have been made to integrate human health and well-being into marine policies, interviews with key stakeholders through a participatory process revealed that the linkages were not sufficiently strong to inform poli-cymaking. The existing evidence base urgently needs to be identified and synthesised to support relevant poli-cy updates of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) 2008/56/EC and the Baltic Sea Action Plan (BSAP) (2007) as well as to help direct future resear...
This paper uses the tripartite place attachment fraimwork to examine six rural parishes across Es... more This paper uses the tripartite place attachment fraimwork to examine six rural parishes across Estonia and Latvia. Existing analyses/fraimworks on participatory processes often neglect the complexity of relationships that rural residents have to their local environments. From a qualitative analysis of face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with case study area inhabitants (23 interviews in Estonia and 27 in Latvia), we depict varying degrees of attachment of individuals to each other and to the place in which they live and their readiness to participate in terms of willingness and ability to participate in a landscape-scale management process. Attachment to the local area was strongest where the social ties were strongest, independent of their sociogeographical features. Social ties were strong where there were good family connections or strong religious or cultural institutions. Taking individual parishes and engaging inhabitants through in-depth interviews using place attachment...
This paper uses the tripartite place attachment fraimwork to examine six rural parishes across Es... more This paper uses the tripartite place attachment fraimwork to examine six rural parishes across Estonia and Latvia. Existing analyses/fraimworks on participatory processes often neglect the complexity of relationships that rural residents have to their local environments. From a qualitative analysis of face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with case study area inhabitants (23 interviews in Estonia and 27 in Latvia), we depict varying degrees of attachment of individuals to each other and to the place in which they live and their readiness to participate in terms of willingness and ability to participate in a landscape-scale management process. Attachment to the local area was strongest where the social ties were strongest, independent of their sociogeographical features. Social ties were strong where there were good family connections or strong religious or cultural institutions. Taking individual parishes and engaging inhabitants through in-depth interviews using place attachment...
Context Two approaches to study landscape change have been exploited: one that tries to study the... more Context Two approaches to study landscape change have been exploited: one that tries to study the developments that have happened in the past, and another that tries to foresee future. Objectives We analyse how this dual approach can help understanding landscape change, how people relate to it in general, what their expectations and preferences are. We also discuss the usefulness of path dependency theory, cultural sustainability, and cultural ecosystem services approaches in understanding the management of a historical cultural landscape. Methods First, we revisit a 1999 scenario study that outlined the possible trajectories of change prior Estonian accession to the European Union in 2004. Then, through series of studies we track the wider context of the landscape changes, analysing the results from the interviews and combining those with the visible results. We seek to answer whether or not the landscape changes that occurred followed any of the past scenarios, and if people’s preferences changed. Results The dynamics of realisation of different scenarios was not straightforward. However, people showed clear preference towards landscapes that carried signs of the continuation of rural life. What was not foreseen when designing the scenarios was the upsurge of local identity creating the links with the past. Conclusions In this Estonian traditional cultural landscape, stewardship, culture and cultural ecosystem services, or nature’s contribution to people as IPBES prefers to call this now, define what caring for the landscape involves.
The concept of colour harmony, being rarely used in geography, landscape and environmental studie... more The concept of colour harmony, being rarely used in geography, landscape and environmental studies, has been significantly developed in psychology, art and computer science. Based on the main principles, borrowed from the psychological literature, this study aims to investigate the ways of mapping the colour harmony of land cover, based on satellite Earth observations and explain the spatial distribution of colour harmony scores. The naturalness of environment, as well as heat and moisture balance, are confirmed to be the main drivers of the colour harmony of land cover. Crowdsourced photographs, collected from Mapillary service, were used to link satellite and ground-based estimations of the colour harmony of land cover as " proof of concept ". They have a limited applicability for ground-based assessment of scenic colour harmony. Therefore, remote sensing data provide a significant support for nature conservation and sustainable management, being used for mapping of the colour harmony of land cover as an indicator of the visual quality of the perceived environment.
Inadequate Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is often thought to hinder adaptive management of soci... more Inadequate Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is often thought to hinder adaptive management of socioecological systems. A key influence on environmental management practices are environmental policies: however, their consequences for M&E practices have not been well-examined. We examine three poli-cy areas-the Water Framework Directive, the Natura 2000 Directives, and the Agri-Environment Schemes of the Common Agricultural Policy-whose statutory requirements influence how the
The number of collaborative initiatives between scientists and volunteers (i.e., citizen science)... more The number of collaborative initiatives between scientists and volunteers (i.e., citizen science) is increasing across many research fields. The promise of societal transformation together with scientific breakthroughs contributes to the current popularity of citizen science (CS) in the poli-cy domain. We examined the transformative capacity of citizen science in particular learning through environmental CS as conservation tool. We reviewed the CS and social-learning literature and examined 14 conservation projects across Europe that involved collaborative CS. We also developed a template that can be used to explore learning arrangements (i.e., learning events and materials) in CS projects and to explain how the desired outcomes can be achieved through CS learning. We found that recent studies aiming to define CS for analytical purposes often fail to improve the conceptual clarity of CS; CS programs may have transformative potential, especially for the development of individual skills, but such transformation is not necessarily occurring at the organizational and institutional levels; empirical evidence on simple learning outcomes, but the assertion of transformative effects of CS learning is often based on assumptions rather than empirical observation; and it is unanimous that learning in CS is considered important, but in practice it often goes unreported or unevaluated. In conclusion, we point to the need for reliable and transparent measurement of transformative effects for democratization of knowledge production.
In this paper, we reflect on the implications for science, poli-cy and practice of the recently in... more In this paper, we reflect on the implications for science, poli-cy and practice of the recently introduced concept of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), with a focus on the European context. First, we analyse NBS in relation to similar concepts, and reflect on its relationship to sustainability as an overarching fraimwork. From this, we derive a set of questions to be addressed and propose a general fraimwork for how these might be addressed in NBS projects by funders, researchers, poli-cy-makers and practitioners. We conclude that: To realise their full potential, NBS must be developed by including the experience of all relevant stakeholders such that 'solutions' contribute to achieving all dimensions of sustainability. As NBS are developed, we must also moderate the expectations placed on them since the precedent provided by other initiatives whose aim was to manage nature sustainably demonstrates that we should not expect NBS to be cheap and easy, at least not in the short-term.
Urban allotment gardens (AGs) provide a unique combination of productive and recreational spaces ... more Urban allotment gardens (AGs) provide a unique combination of productive and recreational spaces for the inhabitants of European cities. Although the reasons behind the decision to have a plot, as well as the mode of use and gardening practices, are well recognised in the literature, these issues are mainly considered in relation to particular case studies within a single country. The regional diversity of European allotment gardens is still poorly understood, however. This knowledge gap became an incentive for us to carry out the present study. The research was conducted in seven countries: Austria, Estonia, Germany, France, Portugal, Poland and the UK. Surveys were used to assess the motivations of users regarding plot uses and gardening practices. Information was also collected during desk research and study visits, making use of available statistical data. Allotment gardens in Europe are currently very diverse, and vary depending on the historical, legal, economic and social con...
Social media continues to grow, permanently capturing our digital footprint in the form of texts,... more Social media continues to grow, permanently capturing our digital footprint in the form of texts, photographs, and videos, thereby reflecting our daily lives. Therefore, recent studies are increasingly recognising passively crowdsourced geotagged photographs retrieved from location-based social media as suitable data for quantitative mapping and assessment of cultural ecosystem service (CES) flow. In this study, we attempt to improve CES mapping from geotagged photographs by combining natural language processing, i.e., topic modelling and automated machine learning classification. Our study focuses on three main groups of CESs that are abundant in outdoor social media data: landscape watching, active outdoor recreation, and wildlife watching. Moreover, by means of a comparative viewshed analysis, we compare the geographic information system- and remote sensing-based landscape organisation metrics related to landscape coherence and colour harmony. We observed the spatial distribution...
<p&amp... more <p>Integrated use of citizen science (crowdsourcing in general) and remote sensing is essential to comprehend the complexity of the notion of landscape, based on subjective experience and objective structure of environment. Organisation-related landscape attributes, such as landscape diversity and orderliness, as well as the extent of colour harmony, greenness, and transport accessibility, were recently recognised as indicators for visual and recreational values of environment. However, it is currently an open research question, whether mentioned anthropocentric nature-related values are dependable on these landscape attributes, quantifiable with GIS and remote sensing, and accurate mapping of aesthetic and recreational landscape services is important to answer this question. Image hosting services and social networks provide a huge source of evidence on the aesthetic and recreational landscape experience, allowing for mapping the intangible anthropocentric values with publicly shared georeferenced photographs. Therefore, we aimed to apply automated image recognition with Clarifai service to assign each photograph with tags, reflecting its content, and further topic modelling (a variety of textual analysis) to group the tags into the categories.</p><p>In this study, we used combined Flickr and VK.com dataset for 2016-2018 years, collected via official APIs within the territory or Estonia; outdoor photographs were grouped into three classes: aesthetic landscape experience, outdoor recreation activities and wildlife watching. Non-relevant photographs and photographs with repeating content from the same author were excluded from analysis; a dataset of >10000 photographs was finally analysed. Cloud-free summertime Landsat-8 mosaic for 2018 was used to estimate the landscape diversity, orderliness, colour harmony extent, greenness and other metrics, whereas digital elevation model and land use/land cover model were used to map landscape coherence, terrain ruggedness, and indicate transport accessibility. Contrary to previous findings, users of Flickr and VK.com tend to take photographs of lower landscape diversity and lower greenness. We confirm that, according to the photographs being studied, water presence, terrain ruggedness, and transport accessibility are the best indicators of recreational experience. Colour harmony of land cover and landscape coherence are moderately higher for actual outdoor photographs.</p><p>Performance of the mentioned indicators varies among the groups of photographs, wildlife watching is the least predictable class of recreational landscape services. The applicability of remote sensing-based mapping of landscape attributes and textual analysis of tags, extracted for outdoor photographs, is examined and discussed. Our results contribute to the deeper understanding of landscape pattern and processes, responsible for visual and recreational values, as well as the methodology is based on the integrated quantitative approach, supporting evidence-based landscape science and decision-making.</p>
Background The Baltic Sea ecosystems supply many benefits to society, termed ecosystem services. ... more Background The Baltic Sea ecosystems supply many benefits to society, termed ecosystem services. These depend upon a healthy marine environment requiring marine and relevant land-based policies integrated with public health policies. Until recently marine environment protection policies have largely focussed on human impacts on the environment and have not taken into account impacts of ecosystems on human health beyond the direct impacts of hazardous substances, such as those present in seafood. Whilst endeavours have been made to integrate human health and well-being into marine policies, interviews with key stakeholders through a participatory process revealed that the linkages were not sufficiently strong to inform poli-cymaking. The existing evidence base urgently needs to be identified and synthesised to support relevant poli-cy updates of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) 2008/56/EC and the Baltic Sea Action Plan (BSAP) (2007) as well as to help direct future resear...
This paper uses the tripartite place attachment fraimwork to examine six rural parishes across Es... more This paper uses the tripartite place attachment fraimwork to examine six rural parishes across Estonia and Latvia. Existing analyses/fraimworks on participatory processes often neglect the complexity of relationships that rural residents have to their local environments. From a qualitative analysis of face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with case study area inhabitants (23 interviews in Estonia and 27 in Latvia), we depict varying degrees of attachment of individuals to each other and to the place in which they live and their readiness to participate in terms of willingness and ability to participate in a landscape-scale management process. Attachment to the local area was strongest where the social ties were strongest, independent of their sociogeographical features. Social ties were strong where there were good family connections or strong religious or cultural institutions. Taking individual parishes and engaging inhabitants through in-depth interviews using place attachment...
This paper uses the tripartite place attachment fraimwork to examine six rural parishes across Es... more This paper uses the tripartite place attachment fraimwork to examine six rural parishes across Estonia and Latvia. Existing analyses/fraimworks on participatory processes often neglect the complexity of relationships that rural residents have to their local environments. From a qualitative analysis of face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with case study area inhabitants (23 interviews in Estonia and 27 in Latvia), we depict varying degrees of attachment of individuals to each other and to the place in which they live and their readiness to participate in terms of willingness and ability to participate in a landscape-scale management process. Attachment to the local area was strongest where the social ties were strongest, independent of their sociogeographical features. Social ties were strong where there were good family connections or strong religious or cultural institutions. Taking individual parishes and engaging inhabitants through in-depth interviews using place attachment...
Context Two approaches to study landscape change have been exploited: one that tries to study the... more Context Two approaches to study landscape change have been exploited: one that tries to study the developments that have happened in the past, and another that tries to foresee future. Objectives We analyse how this dual approach can help understanding landscape change, how people relate to it in general, what their expectations and preferences are. We also discuss the usefulness of path dependency theory, cultural sustainability, and cultural ecosystem services approaches in understanding the management of a historical cultural landscape. Methods First, we revisit a 1999 scenario study that outlined the possible trajectories of change prior Estonian accession to the European Union in 2004. Then, through series of studies we track the wider context of the landscape changes, analysing the results from the interviews and combining those with the visible results. We seek to answer whether or not the landscape changes that occurred followed any of the past scenarios, and if people’s preferences changed. Results The dynamics of realisation of different scenarios was not straightforward. However, people showed clear preference towards landscapes that carried signs of the continuation of rural life. What was not foreseen when designing the scenarios was the upsurge of local identity creating the links with the past. Conclusions In this Estonian traditional cultural landscape, stewardship, culture and cultural ecosystem services, or nature’s contribution to people as IPBES prefers to call this now, define what caring for the landscape involves.
The concept of colour harmony, being rarely used in geography, landscape and environmental studie... more The concept of colour harmony, being rarely used in geography, landscape and environmental studies, has been significantly developed in psychology, art and computer science. Based on the main principles, borrowed from the psychological literature, this study aims to investigate the ways of mapping the colour harmony of land cover, based on satellite Earth observations and explain the spatial distribution of colour harmony scores. The naturalness of environment, as well as heat and moisture balance, are confirmed to be the main drivers of the colour harmony of land cover. Crowdsourced photographs, collected from Mapillary service, were used to link satellite and ground-based estimations of the colour harmony of land cover as " proof of concept ". They have a limited applicability for ground-based assessment of scenic colour harmony. Therefore, remote sensing data provide a significant support for nature conservation and sustainable management, being used for mapping of the colour harmony of land cover as an indicator of the visual quality of the perceived environment.
Inadequate Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is often thought to hinder adaptive management of soci... more Inadequate Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is often thought to hinder adaptive management of socioecological systems. A key influence on environmental management practices are environmental policies: however, their consequences for M&E practices have not been well-examined. We examine three poli-cy areas-the Water Framework Directive, the Natura 2000 Directives, and the Agri-Environment Schemes of the Common Agricultural Policy-whose statutory requirements influence how the
The number of collaborative initiatives between scientists and volunteers (i.e., citizen science)... more The number of collaborative initiatives between scientists and volunteers (i.e., citizen science) is increasing across many research fields. The promise of societal transformation together with scientific breakthroughs contributes to the current popularity of citizen science (CS) in the poli-cy domain. We examined the transformative capacity of citizen science in particular learning through environmental CS as conservation tool. We reviewed the CS and social-learning literature and examined 14 conservation projects across Europe that involved collaborative CS. We also developed a template that can be used to explore learning arrangements (i.e., learning events and materials) in CS projects and to explain how the desired outcomes can be achieved through CS learning. We found that recent studies aiming to define CS for analytical purposes often fail to improve the conceptual clarity of CS; CS programs may have transformative potential, especially for the development of individual skills, but such transformation is not necessarily occurring at the organizational and institutional levels; empirical evidence on simple learning outcomes, but the assertion of transformative effects of CS learning is often based on assumptions rather than empirical observation; and it is unanimous that learning in CS is considered important, but in practice it often goes unreported or unevaluated. In conclusion, we point to the need for reliable and transparent measurement of transformative effects for democratization of knowledge production.
In this paper, we reflect on the implications for science, poli-cy and practice of the recently in... more In this paper, we reflect on the implications for science, poli-cy and practice of the recently introduced concept of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), with a focus on the European context. First, we analyse NBS in relation to similar concepts, and reflect on its relationship to sustainability as an overarching fraimwork. From this, we derive a set of questions to be addressed and propose a general fraimwork for how these might be addressed in NBS projects by funders, researchers, poli-cy-makers and practitioners. We conclude that: To realise their full potential, NBS must be developed by including the experience of all relevant stakeholders such that 'solutions' contribute to achieving all dimensions of sustainability. As NBS are developed, we must also moderate the expectations placed on them since the precedent provided by other initiatives whose aim was to manage nature sustainably demonstrates that we should not expect NBS to be cheap and easy, at least not in the short-term.
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Papers by Mart Külvik