Cultural ecosystem services and disservices in protected areas: Hotspots and influencing factors based on tourists’ digital footprints

Protected areas provide invaluable cultural ecosystem services, attracting increased attention. However, standardized evaluation criteria for cultural ecosystem services (CES) are still lacking, and the influencing factors remain largely unknown, making it difficult to fully understand the CES of protected areas. To address these limitations, we established a comprehensive framework for assessing the CES and selected Wuyishan National Park as a case study, a famous world heritage site attracting large numbers of visitors. A grounded approach was employed to analyze the composition of CES from visitors’ digital footprints data (N = 13,738), and kernel density estimation (KDE) and Geodetector were used to analyze spatial distribution and influencing factors. Results showed that recreation and leisure accounted for the highest proportion (47.63 %) of all the ten CES types derived from the coding of digital footprint data, while four categories of cultural ecosystem disservices (CEDS) constituted 13.15 % of the digital footprint coding count. Hot spots of CES were identified, which exhibited a pattern of higher values in the east and lower in the west. This pattern was primarily influenced by socio-economic factors such as GDP (q = 0.477), regional recreational popularity (q = 0.380), and population density (q = 0.363). The interaction between GDP and distance from the town center contributed significantly (q = 0.641). In the study, we expanded the methodology for quantitatively assessing CES in protected areas, revealing the spatial difference between CES and CEDS, offering scientific and well-founded references to achieve effective conservation and sustainable management for protected areas.