Reconciling community ecology and ecosystem services: Cultural services and benefits from birds in South African National Parks

The ecosystem services paradigm has been used to bridge disciplinary boundaries and to justify conservation action. Protected areas are now expected to both meet species-level conservation objectives and provide ecosystem services. The relationships between species composition and cultural benefits to people are, however, poorly understood. We quantified benefit-biodiversity relationships between birders and bird communities in South African National Parks to test four hypotheses: ‘more is better’, the threshold hypothesis, the rarity hypothesis, and the contextual hypothesis. Data were collected along 293 routes in a paired sampling design. Expert birders, collecting classical point count data, followed (24h later) the GPS-tracked routes of amateur birders. Amateurs completed satisfaction surveys after each route. Bird-related variables, such as diversity and activity, explained c. 27% of variance in birder benefits; other variables, such as the weather and landscape beauty, increased this to 57%. Linear models partially supported ‘more is better’, but indicated that birders adjust expectations and resulting benefits with location. Cultural benefits are delivered at scales ranging from organisms to landscapes. Conserving cultural ecosystem services is not equivalent to conserving species composition. Rigorous measurement of cultural ecosystem services and benefits demands a multi-scale, multi-level perspective that links people to species, ecological communities, and landscapes.