How Do Social Factors Influence Coastal Cultural Ecosystem Services? A case study in the St. Louis River Estuary

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) assessments have the potential to help guide environmental decision-making and increase equitability of management outcomes. CES are the intangible goods and services that arise from the interaction of people with the environment and provide benefits to people. However, there is a gap in understanding of how social factors influence CES, which currently limits the ability of CES assessment to support equitable and just decision-making. This project addresses that gap by applying a mixed methods approach to holistically explore social factors that influence CES in a case study in a Great Lakes coastal community, Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin, situated on the St. Louis River Estuary on Lake Superior. Our approach includes assessment of both social and environmental influences on CES. We are conducting a survey of diverse community members about the CES experiences they had in the previous year, which will allow us to test for associations between sociodemographics (age, race, and income) and CES experiences. This will be followed by semi-structured in-depth qualitative interviews with a subset of participants from diverse backgrounds to help qualitatively explain the observed sociodemographic trends and explore how personal and social identity influence CES experiences. We will investigate how social factors interact with characteristics of the built and natural environment (access, amenities, and ecological health) to influence CES experiences using existing access, amenity, and environmental datasets. This talk will share the study design, ethics review process, and any preliminary results available.