Acknowledgment to the Reviewers of Journal of Environmental & Earth Sciences in 2025
2026-02-06
Integrating Aesthetic Value into Ecosystem Services Assessment: A Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Landscape Management
Authors
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Weimo Wang
College of Applied Technology, Dalian Ocean University, Dalian 116300, China
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30564/jees.v8i5.13231Abstract
The concept of aesthetic value as a part of ecosystem services (ES) assessment is needed to manage the landscape sustainably, although it is still conceptually limited and methodologically divided. This review brings together progress in defining, measuring, and integrating aesthetic value into ES frameworks, and specifically how it can be viewed as a cultural ecosystem service, and how it mediates between ecological conditions and human well-being and behavior. We look at qualitative and participatory methods, which can capture contextual and culturally ingrained perceptions, quantitative measures, and metrics of the landscape that can be compared, and spatially explicit approaches that can be used in planning and scenario analysis. We also evaluate the emerging computational methods, the crowdsourced and image-based information, and point out the possibilities of mapping on a large scale and the difficulties of representativeness, bias, and validation. Based on this synthesis, we suggest a conceptual integration pathway that considers aesthetic value as a joint product between landscape qualities and human senses, expressly showing their interactions, synergies, and trade-offs with other ecosystem services on different scales. It finds significant standardization gaps, dynamics of time, and plural valuation identified and describes the next directions of research on mixed-methods designs, uncertainty management, and more robust science-policy interfaces. Landscape planning can be used to create ecological sustainability and multifunctional landscapes by incorporating aesthetic value in more explicit ES assessment, which can be used to support resilient and multifunctional landscapes.
Keywords:
Ecosystem Services; Aesthetic Value; Cultural Ecosystem Services; Landscape Planning; Multifunctional LandscapesReferences
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Wang, W. (2026). Integrating Aesthetic Value into Ecosystem Services Assessment: A Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Landscape Management. Journal of Environmental & Earth Sciences, 8(5), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.30564/jees.v8i5.13231
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Copyright © 2026 Weimo Wang
This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
