Advancing social-ecological restoration through elicitation of cultural ecosystem services and landscape feature perceptions in restored quarries: a Flickr data analysis

With increasing urbanization and demand for construction materials, quarries have become central to the recovery of degraded landscapes into spaces that offer ecological, but also social benefits. While ecological restoration has long been investigated, integrated social-ecological restoration of post-quarrying landscapes remains underexplored. The overall aim of this study is to advance social-ecological restoration by assessing how cultural ecosystem services (CES) and landscape features (LF) are represented in social media posts about quarries in Germany, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. We focus on concepts of CES and LF to investigate the interactions between humans and restored ecosystems. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed 1,660 geotagged photographs from 50 quarries across three regions: Berlin, Roskilde, and the Czech Karst. Flickr social media data were analyzed to elicit the richness of CES and LF and to identify popular quarries. Our results indicate that rehabilitated quarries exhibit higher CES richness than abandoned or operational ones, and that accessibility significantly influences public engagement. Our study demonstrates that once primarily industrial sites, quarries can evolve into vibrant social-ecological systems that provide diverse LF and CES. It also points to the potential of social media data for designing restoration efforts from a social-ecological perspective. Such an approach provides insights into public perceptions of restored urban landscapes and may inform future restoration strategies.