Forests provide cultural ecosystem services (CES), which are complicated to be evaluated.
To evaluate the aesthetic appreciation of forest stands, this study exploits big data through the analysis of photos shared on the Flickr social network.
On the basis of a geostatistical model we found that high forests and forests in protected areas are the most appreciated. Silver fir, coastal Mediterranean pine, beech and mixed forests resulted as the most preffered species.
The study is available open-access here:
http://foresta.sisef.org/iforest/contents/?id=ifor2821-011