Ricerc@Sapienza

Recently an international debate has been developed about changes affecting ecosystems and about possible future scenarios. Researchers and environmental experts introduced the topic of ecosystem services and promoted studies aimed to evalute them. Ecosystem services include agroecosystems, forest ecosystems, grassland ecosystems, aquatic ecosystems; they are categorised in provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural services.
Recent literature has focused on objective measurement of ecological and economic values of ecosystem services, while only few studies have regarded individual subjective assessment of their socio-cultural values. In fact, natural environment can contribute to enhance human wellbeing and individual satisfaction for quality of life. Thus, it can be useful to measure whether and how people are feeling benefits deriving from socio-cultural values of ecosystem services. It is likely that individual assessment can vary according to social and demographical characteristics. Then, different social groups could perceive and assess ecosystem services differently each other.
The goal of the research is twofold. We aim to propose some methods to measure socio-cultural values of ecosystem services based on individual subjective opinions. We take into account sources of individual and social heterogeneity. The other important goal is to study the dependence of socio-cultural values on the social heterogeneity.
A systematic literature review on the socio-cultural values will be carried out, focusing on studies investigating variables influencing individual assessment. We will study the statistical methodology on the measurement and treatment of individual subjective opinions. Then, we will propose some methods that will be applied to some case studies, discussing advantages and limitations and comparing them with current methods. We will apply appropriate statistical methodologies to study how socio-cultural values depend on social heterogeneity.