Individual survey on the socio-cultural values of temporary rivers ecosystem services

In 2019, sixteen participants from different backgrounds and disciplines met for a two-day workshop within the context of the SMIRES COST Action (Jorda-Capdevila et al. 2020). The goal of the workshop was to discuss the state of research on social perceptions of temporary rivers and advance it through the identification of current needs and the performance of a socio-cultural valuation and conflict analysis.

This dataset contains the results of the second part of the workshop, where individual the participants filled out a socio-cultural valuations exercise of ecosystem services in temporary rivers (see Jorda-Capdevila et al. 2021). Participants had to focus on a geographical area which they were familiar with, and then indicate the level of importance for well-being as perceived by the local public of the corresponding area. We use the level of importance of the ecosystem services provided as an indicator for socio-cultural values. We used a Likert scale ranging from 1 (not important at all) to 5 (very important) of 8 ecosystem services provided by temporary rivers, considering both flowing and non-flowing phases. The ecosystem services evaluated were previously selected from Stubbington et al. (2018) and categorized as provisioning (i.e. freshwater, food from agriculture, food from livestock, fuelwood, health products), regulating (i.e. climate regulation, erosion control, fire regulation, flood-drought regulation, water-flow regulation, pollination, water quality regulation, nutrient cycling) and cultural ecosystem services (i.e. aesthetics values, education, recreation, sense of place, spiritual values).