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The evaluation of landscape services essentially deals with the complex and dynamic relationships between humans and their environment. When it comes to landscape management and the evaluation of the benefits these services provide for our well-being, there is a limited representation of stakeholder and intangible values on the land. Stakeholder knowledge is essential, since disciplinary expert evaluations and existing proxy data on landscape services can reveal little of the landscape benefits to the local stakeholders. This paper aims at evaluating the potential of using local stakeholders as key informants in the spatial assessment of landscape service indicators. A methodological approach is applied in the context of a rural village environment in Tanzania, Zanzibar, where local, spatially sensitive stakeholder knowledge is crucial in solving land management challenges as the resources are used extensively for supporting community livelihoods and are threatened by economic uses and agricultural expansion. A typology of 19 different material and non-material, cultural landscape service indicators is established and, in semi-structured interviews, community stakeholders map these indicators individually on an aerial image. The landscape service indicators are described and spatially analysed in order to establish an understanding of landscape level service structures, patterns and relationships. The results show that community involvement and participatory mapping enhance the assessment of landscape services. These benefits from nature demonstrate spatial clustering and co-existence, but simultaneously also a tendency for spatial dispersion, and suggest that there is far more heterogeneity and sensitivity in the ways the benefits are distributed in relation to actual land resources. Many material landscape service indicators are individually based and spatially scattered in the landscape. However, the well-being of communities is also dependent on the non-material services, pointing out shared places of social interaction and cultural traditions. Both material and non-material services are preferred closest to settlements where the highest intensity, richness and diversity are found. Based on the results, the paper discusses the role of local stakeholders as experts in landscape service assessments and implications for local level management processes. It can be pointed out that the integration of participatory mapping methods in landscape service assessments is crucial for true collaborative, bottom-up landscape management. It is also necessary in order to capture the non-utilitarian value of landscapes and sensitivity to cultural landscape services, which many expert evaluations of landscape or ecosystem services fail to do justice.
