Mapping quality time: Telegram as a public participatory GIS for cultural ecosystem services

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) lack a coherent, universal metric capturing the experiential quality of their use. We argue that the personal quality of time spent outdoors, adapted from cultural consumption such as books, music, or films, offers such a metric, but its empirical use requires scalable, secure, and accessible participatory mapping infrastructures. Existing public participatory GIS (PPGIS) tools rely on standalone applications, costly recruitment, and predominantly one-way data flows from citizens to researchers. These limitations are exacerbated in crisis contexts, such as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, where physical gatherings and the handling of personal data pose security risks. We address both gaps with an open-source, modular Python framework that transforms Telegram, a widely popular messenger in Ukraine, into a secure, GDPR-compliant PPGIS tool, complemented by an interactive dashboard. We piloted the 'Pryroda' Telegram bot along the Dnipro waterfront in Kremenchuk, central Ukraine, in 2025. 219 anonymous participants mapped 230 locations, of which 82% were rated as enjoyable. Random Forest models and statistical association tests consistently showed that the social and behavioural context of a visit, as well as access mode, predict enjoyment more strongly than visitors' socioeconomic profiles, while perceived negative changes since 2022 emerged as the strongest individual-level correlate of poor experience. The framework eliminates installation, recruitment, and licensing costs that constrain PPGIS in developing and crisis settings, and demonstrates that quality of time can serve as a foundation for a coherent theory of value in CES research.