Relevance of Cultural Ecosystem Services in Nurturing Ecological Identity Values That Support Restoration and Conservation Efforts

The research examines the potential role of restoring cultural ecosystem services in sustainably and equitably managing forested landscapes. It looks at how facilitating enhanced usage of cultural ecosystem services may mobilize ecological identities - or one's identification as a responsible agent to a natural system. The study focuses on the village groves of Korea that were restored during the first phase of the village grove restoration program (2003-2015) led by Korea Forest Service (KFS). Questionnaire survey was used to collect data on village leaders' ecological identity values (EIV) and their perception of how village groves' different ecosystem services are being used by villagers and non-villagers. These data were complemented by KFS-published information regarding the village groves' social-ecological system factors. Government documents and independent evaluation reports were analyzed to understand specifically how the restoration program addressed the task of restoring cultural values. Relationship between EIV and ecosystem service usage levels were examined by linear regression analysis, while difference tests were conducted to infer whether or not select social-ecological factors exhibit distinct difference in EIV or in ecosystem service usage levels. While the analytical results are far from conclusive, they hint at certain directions: first, the restoration program is found to have treated village groves themselves to be embodiments of cultural values. This approach leaves a wide gap to effective revival or reinvention of specific cultural uses or values that users can associate with. Second, the regression analysis shows generally stronger influence on village leaders' EIV by cultural ecosystem service usage than by usage of other service types. Examining by subtypes of cultural ecosystem services, those that are villager-oriented compared to visitor-oriented show higher influence on EIV, as do those individually-used compared to collectively-used. Third, the difference tests show no conclusive results about social-ecological system factors, except to speculate that factors conducive to visitor-oriented uses are found associated with lower EIV in village leaders. Furthermore, tourism attraction presence shows not only association with lower EIV but also with generally lower usage of the village groves' varoius ecosystem services. Such findings that show distinctions between villager-oriented andvisitor-oriented services and uses of village groves call for deliberative balancing of possible trade-offs between benefits to different user groups. This seminal study calls for further research on ecological identities, cultural values and cultural ecosystem services as potentially useful approaches to achieve more sustainable and equitable outcomes in restoration and conservation efforts.