Qualitative assessment of ecosystem services for recreation and tourism in the spatio-temporal geosystem

Abstract

The paper proposes a comprehensive method of qualitative evaluation of services provided by various providers, which are expressed by characteristics that avoid a quantitative representation. The research foresees the application of the well-known method of deployment of quality functions, the development of which consists of the possibility of determining the coefficients of the weighting of technical characteristics of cultural ecosystem services for recreation and tourism of the spatiotemporal geosystem. To take into account the priority of consumer requirements, the expert method of pairwise comparisons was introduced, which was modified so that possible conclusions could be considered, in particular, the evaluation of the equivalence of characteristics was applied. To obtain the degree of correlation between the characteristics determined by experts based on consumer requirements and the technical characteristics of cultural ecosystem services for recreation and tourism, it is proposed to utilize the fuzzy logic method. Since both the presence of correlations links and the degree of correlation between consumer requirements and technical characteristics are the result of the interaction of a set of various factors, among which a significant number may be random, based on the central limit theorem, as well as the experience of applying correlation coefficients in other areas, a conclusion is drawn, that the probability distribution function of correlation degrees is properly described by a Gaussian curve. The value of the technical characteristics of the specified ecosystem services for three spatiotemporal geosystems was also obtained with the help of the fuzzy logic method.