Nonmaterial benefits obtained by people from nature in Peru: Multiple approaches for exploring different benefits and worldviews

International audience; Assessments of ecosystem services (ES) improve our understanding of social-ecological systems and can support decision-making and policy development. Integrative ES assessments are challenging because of the diversity of ES, ecosystems that supply services, and social groups that benefit from ES. Challenges are the greatest for nonmaterial benefits that people receive from nature (often called cultural ES), for example, through recreation, aesthetic experiences, spiritual enrichment, or cognitive development, particularly because of their subjectivity. As the definition of nonmaterial benefits differs between cultures and social groups, there is a need to assess cultural ES with transdisciplinary methods that recognize multiple worldviews on nature and explicitly link assessment results with the people concerned by ES. In other terms, the assessment should strongly integrate the “what” and the “for whom” questions, particularly because responses to the latter question determine how the former question should be addressed. We assessed several cultural ES related to recreation, scenic beauty and spiritual values in the Mariño watershed (Apurímac region) in Peru using several complementary methods, ranging from participatory methods (focus group discussions, interviews, and surveys) to big data modelling (analysis of geotagged pictures from the Internet). Discourse analysis applied to interview content allowed to understand the diversity of views on the nonmaterial interactions between people and ecosystems and helped us develop a framework for analyzing such interactions. Surveys showed what landscape or ecosystem attributes explained cultural ES, for example aesthetic preferences for certain landscape elements, and how ES perceptions differed among different social groups (e.g. by gender, age, and origin). The analysis of geotagged data from the Internet also revealed preferences on ES attributes and the location of ecosystem providing high levels of nonmaterial benefits. Results allow to discuss the complementary of different approaches for assessing ES related to recreation, scenic beauty and spiritual values.