Advanced Building and Urban Design

Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) offer personal and contextual value including aesthetic appreciation, leisure activities, spiritual development and cultural identification. However, as opposed to other ES relying on biophysical data, the intangibility of CES has historically impeded precise measurement. Policy and planning discussions often fail to adequately recognize cultural ecosystem services, leaving their contributions to mental well-being, community identity, education, and economic growth poorly defined and lacking greater market value, leading CES to be significant underrepresented. Nevertheless, promising tools, such as Citizen Science (CS), encompassing both citizen-driven scientific endeavors and science serving civic interests, presents a valuable methodology for investigating and revealing the potential of CES. CS tools and other crowd-sourced assessments are helping to shift the perception of CES from being ‘invisible’ to more visible and measurable. Geotagged photos, social media, biodiversity observations, and community narratives are some geographically referenced data citizen science sites, which show how individuals experience and appreciate their natural surroundings. Thereby, it allows a more dynamic and complex measurement of CES. However, integration of CS and monetization of CES remains to be a challenge. Most existing platforms focus on non-monetary data, and don’t assign monetary value to interactions. The linkages between cultural data and economic metrics remains to be complex and subjective. Inherent limitations exist in the data due to its voluntary nature from CS; this may result in inconsistencies, a lack of standardization, or inaccuracies. Ethical and philosophical aspects must be carefully considered when assigning economic value to CES, since it may risk undermining the altruistic motivations of citizen scientists. Also, the resulting valuation must be credible and reliable to gather support from institutional and policy makers. This research aims to address the challenges of integrating CES, CS, and economic valuation methodologies listed above. We propose developing an initial framework, based on a systematic literature review, that establishes standardized approaches for incorporating economic valuation into citizen science tools. Additionally, we identify potential technological enhancements for existing CS platforms to facilitate economic valuations, including sophisticated user assessment protocols, integration with economic databases, and adaptive interfaces designed to minimize bias. These improvements seek to enhance data reliability and usability for economic studies while still preserving the cooperative nature of Citizen Science. As emerging CS technologies enhance the quantification of CES, integrating monetization and establishing market values within these tools represents the critical next step in advancing their recognition and support in policy and planning.