Expanding the suite of Cultural Ecosystem Services to include ingenuity, perspective, and life teaching

Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) are a crucial but relatively understudied component of the ecosystem services framework. While the number and diversity of categories of other types of ES have steadily increased, CES categories are still largely defined by a few existing typologies. Based on our empirical data, we suggest that those typologies need updating. We analyzed data from interviews conducted in adjacent Hawaiian ecosystems-one agricultural and one forested. We found that current categories of CES do not capture the diversity and nuance of the nonmaterial benefits that people described receiving from ecosystems. We propose three new CES categories: ingenuity, life teaching, and perspective. We discuss issues of lumping and splitting CES categories, and advocate that creating categories for these emerging themes will help us to more fully capture nonmaterial benefits in ecosystem services research and policy.