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Human recognition, valuation, and communication lie at the heart of ecosystem goods and services. We explore how the wellbeing effects of ecosystems are recognized and communicated based on data obtained from an information campaign to increase public awareness of the health and wellbeing benefits of rural nature areas in Finland. Interested members of the public from different backgrounds were asked to outline and publicly share short descriptions of their personal recommendations for improving their wellbeing through interacting with rural landscapes. The results indicate that a wide variety of ecosystem types and functions are perceived to be important for producing a range of wellbeing benefits through experiencing and multisensory observations of natural landscapes. The importance of cultural and experiential ecosystem services were highlighted while provisioning services received only minor attention, and regulating services were almost entirely unnoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late twentieth century, many developed countries have experienced population deconcentration, labelled as counterurbanization. There has been an academic discussion on the meaning, validity and universality of this concept, drivers of counterurbanization and its impacts on rural areas. To date, research on counterurbanization mostly apply static and discrete definitions of residence, migration and population, which is an increasingly simplistic view in the contemporary reality of a growing multitude of forms of mobility, often related to dual residence. Particularly large-scale quantitative studies on counterurbanization are confined by existing statistical practices. This paper attempts to overcome this obstacle and describe the transformation of the settlement system in Finland acknowledging the role of second home mobility. To achieve this goal, it introduces two alternative measures of population, seasonal and average population, and analyses their spatial dynamics between the years 1990 and 2010 based on georeferenced grid statistical data. The study finds that although registered population has been concentrating during the period in analysis, seasonal population has been increasingly dispersed due to the growing number of second homes. It shows that the counterurbanization process, though not noticed by conventional statistics, does occur in Finland, manifested by seasonal rather than permanent moves. The article concludes that various forms of mobility should be taken into account when analysing the urban-rural population dynamics and transformations of settlement systems as well as in rural development planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]