IJERD – International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development (2017) 8-2

Research article
erd

Spatial Assessment of Cultural Ecosystem Services for
Urban Forests based on a Multi-point Field Survey:
Case in Nagoya City, Japan
KIICHIRO HAYASHI*
Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
Email: maruhaya98--@imass.nagoya-u.ac.jp

MAKOTO OOBANational Institute for Environmental Studies, Miharu, Japan
Received 14 December 2016

Accepted 10 November 2017(*Corresponding Author)

Abstract Urban forests including urban parks, secondary forests, and natural forests provide
many benefits for citizens, such as recreational opportunities, scenic beauty, and cultural
heritage value. Each has a different role in the provision of cultural ecosystem services(CESs) in a city. One issue with urban forests in Japan is the decrease of forests with the lossof CESs. The objective of this study was to develop a method to categorize the CESs of urban
forests through multi-point field surveys as a case in Nagoya City, Japan. Then theequivalency and/or alternativeness of the forest CESs were examined. In total, 180 forests inthe city were surveyed. The percentages of forests featuring aesthetic and daily recreation
values were high. Using a hierarchical cluster analysis, the forests in the city were categorized
into 9 types. Future issues include the idea that, in addition to CESs, other ESs should beconsidered as a part of a comprehensive ES assessment.
Keywords GIS, ecosystem service, cultural ecosystem service, forest, JapanINTRODUCTION
Urban forests have many benefits for citizens, such as recreational opportunities, scenic beauty, andcultural heritage value. There are several types of forest: urban parks, secondary forests, naturalforests, and more. Each has a different role in the provision of ecosystem services (ESs) (Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment (MA), 2005). One issue with urban forests in Japan is their decrease over the
past few decades due to the loss of forests. For example, in Nagoya, which is the third largest urban
area in Japan, forest area has been decreasing. According to the Nagoya City government, the green
coverage ratio of the city, including forests, grassland, agricultural land, and water bodies, was 22.0%
in 2015 which was a decrease from 29.8% in 1990 (Nagoya City, 2015).
Cultural ESs (CESs) bring aesthetic value, recreation, education value, spiritual and religious
values, inspiration, social relations, and cultural heritage value (MA, 2005). CESs are different fromother ESs because they are assessed subjectively by individuals (Burkhard et al., 2012). Nahuelhual
et al. (2013) summarized the approaches to the spatial mapping of CESs, such as recreation andecotourism, into four types: visitors’ expenditure; recreation areas; monetary benefits; and valuing
by stakeholder assessment (Sieber, 2006; Sherrouse et al., 2011; van Riper et al., 2012; Hayashi etal., 2015). Nahuelhual et al. (2013) also developed a method to evaluate CESs using maps. Then,plenty of scholars have conducted economic evaluations of CESs (Costanza et al., 1997). By
providing a city-scale assessment, several papers explored ES spatial assessments, including the
CESs provided by urban forests (Dobbs et al., 2014; McPhearson et al., 2013). However, the scopeof the CES items was limited. So, comprehensive and detailed assessments of CESs are needed tounderstand their provision and usage on a city scale.
Then it will be possible to discuss the equivalency and alternativeness of the CESs provided byurban forests. This is the focus of this study.

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OBJECTIVES
The objective of this study is to develop a method to categorize forest CESs from the perspective of
their provision and usage using multi-point field surveys. Then the equivalency and/or
alternativeness of the CESs will be examined. The case study focused on urban forests in Nagoya
City, Japan.

Fig. 1 Maps of the study area: (a) Japan with Nagoya City as a star symbol, (b) Nagoya City
outlined in black with forests (≥1 ha) in green, (c) east-part of Nagoya City (as an
example) with forests and bamboo forests in green and red, respectively
Source: Hayashi and Ooba (2015) and Hayashi (2017), forest and bamboo from Nagoya green coverage GIS
provided by Nagoya City

METHODOLOGY
Nagoya City (city hall location: 35.181°N, 136.906°E) is the third largest city population-wise inJapan, with over 2 million residents. It is located in the geographical center of Japan (Fig. 1 (a)). The
average annual temperature in 2015 was 16.6°C, and the average precipitation was 1803 mm (Japan
Meteorological Agency, 2016). The city has an area of about 326 km2 (Nagoya City, 2016b).
In this study, multi-point field surveys were employed to understand the provision and citizen
usage of forest CESs. In the study, forests were defined as continuous tree crown areas with one haor more of forest area. Based on the Nagoya green coverage geographic information system (GIS)
data (provided by Nagoya City via personal communication), 180 forests (among around 240 total)
with one ha or more of forest area were studied.
The field surveys were conducted in a similar style to Hayashi and Ooba (2015), which was asfollows. First, one of the authors surveyed the entire forest area by foot. Then the forest usage ofeach CES was judged subjectively on the following five-point scale, tentatively: 1. “very frequently,”
2. “frequently,” 3. “sometimes,” 4. “not so much,” and 5. “rarely used,” as well as “not enoughinformation to make a decision,” for both inside of the forest and the surrounding area. After
conducting several visits to each forest site in various seasons from 2013 to 2016, the final scores
were determined by the author subjectively with the opinions of field survey collaborators. The
values were then put in the opposite order (e.g., 5. “very frequently” to 1. “rarely used”) and thenconverting to 0 to 1 value. The CESs, which followed the categories of MA (2005) with somemodifications, included in this study are listed in Table 1. However, based on several visits to each
forest, “education value: school-related event,” “inspiration,” and “social relations: working or
schooling in the forest” were slightly difficult to evaluate, so these items were excluded from theanalysis. In total, 14 CES items (CES14) were used. Then seven new CES items were developed
from the CES14 (Table 1). The maximum score of each CES14 value was selected for each CES7
value. Then, the following four data sets were used for the analysis: CES14 inside forest (CES14 inforest), CES14 inside forest with the surrounding area (CES14 in area), CES7 in forest, and CES7 inarea. For example, let us imagine that there were children’s play facilities in a park. If these werelocated inside a park forest, they would be classified as CES14 in forest and CES14 in area. However,if they were not inside a park forest but rather around the forest inside the park, they would beclassified as only CES14 in area.
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Table 1 CES14 and CES7 categories
CES14
Contents
subCES1 Aesthetic value
subCES2 Daily recreation: walking, etc.
subCES3 Daily recreation: play with children by play facilities
subCES4 Daily recreation: play in forest (e.g. insect collecting)subCES5 Holiday recreation: holiday leisure, picnics, hiking, etc.
subCES6 Holiday recreation: sports, etc.
subCES7 Attraction facilities*1
Education value: school-related event
subCES8 Education value: nature observation meetings/classes
subCES9 Spiritual value*2
Inspiration
subCES10 Traditional festival
subCES11 Normal festival
subCES12 Religious value
subCES13 Cultural heritage value*3
Social relations: working or schooling in the forest
subCES14 Social relations: volunteers

CES7
Aesthetic value (AE)Daily recreation (DRE)
Holiday recreation (HRE)
Education value (ED)
Education value (ED)Spiritual and religious values (SR)Spiritual and religious values (SR)Social relations (SO)Spiritual and religious values (SR)
Cultural heritage value (CH)Social relations (SO)Note: *1, *2 and *3 were excluded.

In addition, the basic parameters of the CESs were listed for each forest: “forest area,” “in scenic
districts designated by the city (S_D)” (Nagoya City, 2016a), “in shrine or temple (S_T),” and “inmajor attraction facilities listed by the city (A_F)” (Nagoya City, 2014).
Utilizing the CES14, statistical analyses including the Kolmogorov-Smirnov normality test andSpearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient among the CES14 items were conducted. Also, toinvestigate what percentage of Nagoya forest provided each CES, the total number of forests
provided by each CES was summed up and divided by the total number of forests studied (N=180).
For the CES7 data sets, similar basic statistical analysis was conducted. Then, the differencesamong the CES7 in area items were tested with Friedman’s test with pairwise comparisons. Also, ahierarchical cluster analysis (using Ward linkage) was conducted to categorize Nagoya City’s forests
into several types based on the CES7 in area with basic parameters: namely, forest area, S_D, S_T,
and A_F after converting to the 0 to 1 scale.
Statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS ver. 22 (IBM). ArcGIS10.2.2 (ESRI) was used
for GIS analyses.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In total, 180 forests were studied. The total area of accumulated forest area studied was over 1,000
ha, which was around 30% of the total tree area in the city in 2015 (Nagoya City, 2015).
Table 2 Basic statistics for each subCES on a five-point scale
CES14 in
Forest
CES14 inArea

MeanMedianMeanMediansubCES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 10 11 12 13 14
2.3 2.2 1.4 1.7 1.9 1.0 1.3 1.7 2.0 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.4 2.1
3
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2.8 2.7 2.1 2.0 2.3 1.9 1.7 2.0 2.2 1.5 1.7 1.7 1.5 2.3
3
3
1
1
3
1
1
1
3
1
1
1
1
3

Table 2 shows the mean and median of each CES14 on a five-point scale for both the CES14 inforest and in area. SubCES1 (aesthetic value), subCES2 (daily recreation: walking, etc.), andⒸ ISERD

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subCES5 (holiday recreation: holiday leisure, picnics, hiking, etc.) under CES14 in area showed
relatively higher values than the other CESs.
Regarding the correlation coefficient among the CES14in area categories, subCES2-subCES3,
subCES2-subCES9, subCES3-subCES4, and subCES7-subCES11 were relatively highly correlated,with coefficients over 0.7 (see Table 3).
Table 3 Correlation coefficients among CES14 in area
subCES
2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

subCES1 .623** .514** .454** .685** .252** .491** .616** .625** .185* .532** .076 .212** .429**
subCES2.737** .667** .540** .428** .171* .575** .741** -.111 .261** .093 -.060.588**
subCES3.888** .466** .572** .077 .398** .678** -.104 .252** .032 -.080.416**
subCES4.449** .549** .092 .429** .616** -.105 .272** .009 -.066.359**
**
**
**
**
**
subCES5.056 .554**.265 .478 .550 .596 .016 .585 -.094
subCES6.169* .256** .395** -.254** .253** -.177* -.161* .127
subCES7.386** .315** .152* .720** -.157* .290** .179*****
subCES8.002.000 .549**.660 -.106 .454
subCES9-.115 .348** .036
.057 .593**
subCES10.129 .502** .624** -.096
subCES11-.238** .202** .225**
subCES12.376** .033
subCES13.029

Note: statistical significance: **, <0.01; *, <0.05, N=180

The results on the percentage of forest provided by each CES in area against the total numberof forests are presented in Fig. 2. SubCES1 and subCES2 showed high percentages of nearly 80%.
This means that nearly the 80% of the forests in Nagoya were used for subCES1 and subCES2
purposes. SubCES5, subCES9 and subCES14 were more than half. Conversely, the percentages ofsubCES7 (attraction facilities) and subCES10 (traditional festival) were relatively small, at around20%. These kinds of CESs were found in a limited number of forests.
100%%of forest, N=180

80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

subCES

Fig. 2 Percentage of forests provided by each subCES in Nagoya
Regarding the analysis of the CES7 in area, the mean and median of each CES7 item arepresented in Table 4. Here, the AE and DRE were high, but the CH was low. The results ofFriedman’s test showed that the differences among the several CES7 items were statisticallysignificant, such as CH-ED and ED-HRE.
Table 4 Basic statistics for each CES7 on a five-point scale
CES7 inArea

MeanMedianAE
2.8
3

DRE HRE
2.8
2.6
3
3

ED
2.3
2

SR
2.7
3

CH
1.5
1

Note: Friedman's test with selected pairwise comparison; CH-ED:**, ED-SO: NS , ED-HRE:*,
SO-SR: NS, HRE-SR: NS; SR-AE: NS, **, <0.01; *, <0.05, NS: not significant; N=180Ⓒ ISERD

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IJERD – International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development (2017) 8-2

Table 5 Cluster analysis results for 9 forest categories(Using Ward linkage, total N=180)
Category No and contents

N Area(ha)1393

1: in A_F
CES medium to
2: in S_T
high in S_D
3: other
4: in S_T in S_D
CES low to
medium

CH

1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0

12

24

35

198

7: outside of S_D, S_T and A_F with medium CESs
8: outside of S_D, S_T and A_F with low to medium CESs

16
12

37
26

9: outside of S_D, S_T and A_F with low CESs

24
180

41
1,036

S_T

SO
A_F

CH

Category1
Category2

SR

AE

Category3

SO

CH

DRE

S_D
S_T
A_F

Category4
Category5

AE
ED

Category6

DRE
HRE

S_D
S_T
A_F

AE

SR

DRE
ED

1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0

SR

HRE

1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0

529
44

6: in S_D with low CESs

S_D

ED

44

43
15

5: in S_T out side of S_D

Total

SO

10

HRE

Category7
Category8
Category9

S_D
S_T:
A_F:
AE:
DRE:
HRE:
ED:
SR:
CH:
SO:

Scenic districts
Shrine/temple
Major attraction facilities in Nagoya
Aesthetic value
Daily recreation
Holiday recreation
Education value
CES7 category
Spiritual and religious values
Cultural heritage value
Social relations

Fig. 3 Radar charts for each forest category after averaging values in each category
Using a hierarchical cluster analysis, we divided Nagoya’s forests into 9 categories using thedata sets of the CES7 in area with basic parameters. A basic description of the 9 categories can befound in Table 5, and the results of the radar charts for the categories are presented in Fig. 3.
According to the results, the forests in category 1, including Atsuta Jingu shrine and Nagoya Castle,
have relatively high values for most of the CES7 items within major attraction facilities (A_F),
because these are major historical and cultural spots in Nagoya featuring nature areas. The forests,
namely, Higashiyama Park, were also high in most of the CES7 items except for the CH, because a
zoo and a botanical garden with nature areas can be found in these areas. Categories 2 showed
relatively high values for most of the CES7 items in shrines or temples (S_T) including cemetery.
The total number and area of forests in category 3 were 43 and 529 ha, respectively—higher than theother categories. On the other hand, categories 4 and 5 were located in shrines or temples (S_T) with
low to medium CESs in which a lot of the natural forests were designated as conservation areas by
the city or prefecture. The forests in category 9 were located outside of S_D, S_T, and A_F, with low
CES7 items because they are located in a remote or low intervention area. So these are relatively low
provisions for CES assessments.

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Regarding the equivalency and/or alternativeness of the forest CESs, forests within the same
category had similar roles in CES provision and usage by citizens, so their equivalency and/or
alternativeness were relatively high. The number of forests in categories 1 and 2 with high CESs was
small, so their alternativeness was relatively low.
An important point is that the forest category only included the CES contents and should be
elaborated on; for example, the spatial distribution of the forest CESs and their future demands could
be included. Also, the results were obtained by focusing on CES assessment without consideringother ESs and habitats/species, except for basic parameters considered. Some forests were located insomewhat remote areas, even in a big city, so that there still remained natural forest with little humanintervention. In this case, the use of cultural aspects of ESs were limited. These issues should beconsidered appropriately as part of a comprehensive ES assessment in the future.
CONCLUSION
In this study, based on multi-point field surveys, a method to categorize CESs was considered, taking
into account their provision and usage as a case study in Nagoya City. Also, the equivalency and/or
alternativeness of forests from the perspective of CESs were examined. The correlations among
CESs were not very high, except among recreation values. The percentages of forests equipped withaesthetic and daily recreational values were high in the city. Via cluster analysis, the forests werecategorized into 9 types by CES7 in area with forest area, S_D, S_T, and A_F. Then the equivalency
and/or alternativeness of the forest CESs were discussed. This forest categorization could be used
for a CES management planning and environmental assessment for development activities. Futureissues include the fact that, in addition to CES assessment, other ESs and habitat/species assessment
should be considered as part of a comprehensive ES assessment.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the Nagoya City Greeniﬁcation and Public Works Bureau and the many forest owners who
gave us permission to do the field surveys. We also thank Natsuko Yoshino, Wataru Kobayashi,
Yuya Katada, Masaki Iwai, Kay Khaing Lwin, Yusuke Yonekura, Yasuhiro Hasegawa, and Hiroaki
Sumi for their assistance with the field survey. This research was supported by “KAKENHI”
15K00622 from JSPS, Japan; the “Funding Program for Next Generation World-Leading
Researchers” from JSPS and MEXT, Japan; and the “Environment Research and Technology
Development Fund (1-1401)” from MOE-J, Japan.
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