Visualization is an important part of sharing research for our team. Here we offer a few examples of visualizations that help to convey important ideas from our work. Hover over each for a caption and the citation for the source paper.
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Generations of cultural ecosystem services research: Heuristic timeline depicting the first and second generations of cultural ecosystem service (CES) research. Colors indicate rough trends associated with the three CES-related approaches (red, ecosystem services [ES] and nature’s contributions to people [NCP]; dark blue, biocultural approaches; light blue, relational values). The timeline is based on review papers and highly cited perspective pieces rather than a comprehensive analysis. Color flows (and specific papers referenced) are based on authors’ interpretations and knowledge of the subject areas and thus offer one approximation of and perspective on the research depicted.
Gould, R.K., Satterfield, T., Leong, K., Fisk, J. 2025. The Generations of Cultural Ecosystem Services research. Conservation Biology.
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Relationships between value-related constructs and all other constructs in theories of behavior, according to a systematic review of behavior theories. The idea of moving ‘further’ from values, from left to right, indicates that as we move further to the right, the categories and constructs listed are increasingly conceptually distinct from values as related to principle. Further to the right, values related to principles play less important roles, and some value-adjacent constructs may be entirely independent of values-as-principle. The increasing size of the cone surrounding the constructs indicates the increasing prevalence of the type of construct (values related to principle, values related to judgment of importance, value-adjacent, and all other constructs) in the review that this paper reports.
Gould, R.K. et al. REFERENCE
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Chord diagram showing strong overlap between different nonmaterial values in semi-structured interviews regarding the impacts of reef decline and coastal development on non-material values in West Hawaiʻi. In parentheses is the percentage of mentions where that non-material value was discussed in conjunction with another non-material value. Length of the circumference occupied by each value represents the number of times it was coded (alone or with other non-material values).
Adams, A., Palacat-Nelsen, S.A., Gould, R.K. 2025. Ecological Decline Degrades Non-Material Values—but Resistance and Resilience Complicate the Story. Sustainability Science.
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Characteristics of relational values – core, definitional characteristics, and other important associated qualities
Gould, R.K. 2022. Relational Values. Entry in The Encyclopedia of Biodiversity. Princeton University Press.
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Relationships between environmental change and non-material values, including other forces and factors at play, as discussed in semi-structured interviews regarding the impacts of reef decline and coastal development on non-material values in West Hawaiʻi. Arrows indicate direct or indirect influence. Dotted arrow indicates an unknown relationship, as participant responses suggested.
Adams, A., Palacat-Nelsen, S.A., Gould, R.K. 2025. Ecological Decline Degrades Non-Material Values—but Resistance and Resilience Complicate the Story. Sustainability Science.
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Critiques of cultural ecosystem services: Common critiques (foundational (purple text, dashed lines) and mechanical (blue text, dotted lines)); responses described in the chapter (orange; symbols denote categories); and reflections on how operationalization might minimize critiques (green).
Gould, R.K. and Satterfield, T. 2025. Critiques of cultural ecosystem services, and ways forward that minimize them. Pages 13–26 in P. McElwee, K. Allen, R. Gould, M. Hsu, and J. He, editors. The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Ecosystem Services. Routledge, London, UK.www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003414896-3/critiques-cultural-ecosystem-services-ways-forward-minimize-rachelle-gould-terre-satterfield?context=ubx&refId=37795827-e9ea-4bc4-ac78-4dbb06db180c
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Results of analogies analysis. (A) Heatmap of similarity of literature-generated analogies to many possible permutations of the nature:people analogy (using all of our nature terms, each paired with both “people” and “humans”). The sign of each similarity index indicates the direction of the analogy: if the number is positive, the analogy matches more closely in the direction listed above; if the number is negative, the analogy matches more closely in the reverse direction. (B) Histogram of cosine distributions between the combined nature-people wordcloud concept vector and all combinations of the top 5000 terms in the corpus by frequency; this provides context for how strong relationships are between analogies (e.g., it demonstrates that cosine similarities of 0.2 are extremely uncommon).
Gould, R.K., Demarest (PD), B., Ivakhiv, A., Cheney, N. Nature is resource, playground, and gift: What artificial intelligence reveals about human–nature relationships. 2024. PLoS One.
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Five roles that cultural ecosystem services research plays. This is from a paper called “the dragons of cultural ecosystem services,” after a Clifford Geertz quote about the role of anthropology as “looking into dragons, not domesticating or abominating them, nor drowning them in vats of theory…”.
Gould, R.K., Vivanco, L., Adams, A. 2020. Looking into the dragons of cultural ecosystem services. Ecosystems and People. 16(1): 257-272.
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Examples of papers that study cultural ecosystem services with biophysical specificity. Organized by “Ecosystem Service Providers” (i.e., biophysical entities associated with the service). Examples are associated with the following publications, as indicated by superscript numbers: (1) Pascua et al. 2017; (2) Amberson et al. 2018; (3) Cortés-Avizanda et al. 2018; (4) Graves, Pearson, Turner 2017; (5) Echeverri et al. 2020; (6) King et al. 2017; (7) Graves 2019, 2017b; (8) Pleininger et al. 2013; (9) Keeler et al 2015; (10) Willis et al. 2018; (11) Baulcomb et al. 2015. [See publication for full citations.]
Gould, R.K., Bremer, L., Pascua, P., Meza Prado, K. 2020. Frontiers in cultural ecosystem services: Toward greater equity and justice in ecosystem services research and practice. Bioscience. 70(12): 1093-1107.
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Annual willingness to pay for clean electricity policy segmented by experience with extreme events and holding all other variables constant. Bars represent standard errors. For each model, the marginal WTP specific to Extreme Events is significant; error bars overlap despite this significance due to the additional error from control variable estimates. Blue bars represent participants who had experienced extreme events; green bars represent participants who had not experienced extreme events.
Gould, R.K. Shrum, T. R., Ramirez Harrington, D., & Iglesias, V. 2024. Experience with extreme weather events increases willingness-to-pay for climate mitigation policy. Global Environmental Change.
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Examples of methods that can be used to measure relative importance of nature’s nonmaterial values.
Marquina, T. and Gould, R.K. 2025. Methods to measure relative importance of cultural ecosystem services. Pages 228-242 in P. McElwee, K. Allen, R. Gould, M. Hsu, and J. He, editors. The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Ecosystem Services. Routledge, London, UK.