Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are consistently recognized but not yet adequately defined or integrated within the ES framework. A substantial body of models, methods, and data relevant to cultural services has been developed within the social and behavioral sciences before and outside of the ES approach. A selective review of work in landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance demonstrates opportunities for operationally defining cultural services in terms of socioecological models, consistent with the larger set of ES. Such models explicitly link ecological structures and functions with cultural values and benefits, facilitating communication between scientists and stakeholders and enabling economic, multicriterion, deliberative evaluation and other methods that can clarify tradeoffs and synergies involving cultural ES. Based on this approach, a common representation is offered that frames cultural services, along with all ES, by the relative contribution of relevant ecological structures and functions and by applicable social evaluation approaches. This perspective provides a foundation for merging ecological and social science epistemologies to define and integrate cultural services better within the broader ES framework.

This paper focuses on soundscape planning, or acoustic design, in the planning and management of open space in both urban and non‐urban areas. It is based on notions, promoted over several decades, that the acoustic aspects of open space can, and should be, subject to design in the same way as are the visual dimensions. The current paradigm for the management of the outdoor acoustic environment is noise control and soundscape planning needs to adopt quite different practices from noise control with respect to acoustic criteria and measurement. The paper explores the specification of acoustic objectives for outdoor soundscapes and the translation of these objectives into acoustic criteria that are amenable to measurement and prediction as part of the design process. Such objectives, termed Proposed Acoustic Environments, focus on the information content in sounds in a particular space and, only indirectly, on characteristics such as level or loudness. Outdoor acoustic design is mostly concerned with avoiding, or achieving, the masking of one set of information in the acoustic signal with other sets of information in the same signal. These are critical methodological issues if soundscape planning is to move from being a good idea to common practice. The paper sets out the elements of a process for the acoustic design or management of outdoor space.

Existing frameworks for analysing interactions between social and natural systems (e.g. Social-Ecological Systems framework, Ecosystem Services concept) do not sufficiently consider and operationalize the dynamic interactions between people's values, attitudes and understandings of the human-nature relationship at both individual and collective levels. We highlight the relevance of individual and collective understandings of the human-nature relationship as influencing factors for environmental behaviour, which may be reflected in natural resource management conflicts, and review the diversity of existing social-cultural concepts, frameworks and associated research methods. Particular emphasis is given to the context-sensitivity of social-cultural concepts in decision-making. These aspects are translated into a conceptual model aiming not to replace but to expand and enhance existing frameworks. Integrating this model into existing frameworks provides a tool for the exploration of how social-cultural concepts of nature interact with existing contexts to influence governance of social-ecological systems.