Citation:

Wick, M., J. Hoffman, AND L. Johnson. How do social factors influence coastal cultural ecosystem services? A case study in the St. Louis River Estuary. A Community on Ecosystem Services (ACES) Meeting, NA, MN, December 12 - 15, 2022. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.21681896

Impact/Purpose:

Presentation to the A Community on Ecosystem Services (ACES) Meeting December 2022. This presentation will include an outline of the study design for an assessment of cultural ecosystem services in the St. Louis River Estuary. Sharing the research design at this conference will be an opportunity to get feedback on the design and share how this approach could be adapted to other social-ecological systems. This research will advance managers’ ability to use a cultural ecosystem service framework to guide equitable environmental management decisions. 

Description:

Under the U.S. EPA’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), one of many initiatives to clean up U.S. coasts, $3.8 billion have been spent since 2010, although few studies have assessed the equity or human well-being impacts of these investments. Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are the intangible benefits arising from interaction between people and nature, and their assessment could help fill that need. However, the application of CES to inform and evaluate decisions has been limited in part because studies have focused primarily on environmental influences on CES delivery rather than social influences, even though social factors are widely acknowledged to impact CES. To address this, we share our mixed methods study design to explore how social factors (demographics, identity, sociohistorical context) influence CES experiences in a case study of the St. Louis River estuary of Lake Superior. The area includes Duluth, Minnesota, Superior, Wisconsin, and the traditional and reservation lands of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The area is the focus of ongoing sediment remediation and habitat restoration under GLRI. Community and Indigenous advisory groups were convened to help guide study methods, recruit participants, and help interpret and share results. Our approach includes a survey of diverse community members to test associations between sociodemographics (age, race, and income) and participants’ CES experiences. This will be followed by semi-structured interviews with a subset of survey participants from diverse backgrounds to help explain observed sociodemographic trends and qualitatively explore how identity and sociohistorical context influence CES experiences. Social and environmental factors are entangled, so we will also evaluate environmental factors. We will test for associations between reported CES experiences and access, amenities, habitat type, and ecosystem condition, based on local knowledge and existing datasets. This study will help expand the application of CES to guide equitable decision-making in diverse communities. Results will help identify management interventions to increase the supply, quality, and equity of CES benefits. Results will be specific to the case study but may be transferrable to other Great Lakes coastal social-ecological systems and will provide a holistic framework for researchers to measure and understand CES elsewhere.

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