Abstract: The symbolic significance of flagship species reflects the relationship between environment and culture, which is conducive to enhancing regional cultural identity. Clarifying the spatial relationship between supply and demand of cultural ecosystem services of flagship species is of great significance for the protection of special ecosystems, cultural landscape planning, and sustainable development. In this study, we selected the network attention and enterprise usage (named or marked) of giant panda as indices to measure its potential and realized demand for cultural ecosystem services, identified the supply and demand areas of giant panda cultural ecosystem services, and analyzed their features of distribution. We also explored the influencing factors and the mechanism underlying the forming of cultural ecosystem service flow using principal component analysis. The results showed that the Giant Panda National Park was the giant panda cultural ecosystem services supply area, which only accounted for 0.3% of total area of China. The main supply area was in Sichuan. Limited by giant panda’s population size and transportation accessibility, the giant panda cultural ecosystem services supply areas had a low supply capacity. Both the demand areas and service flow paths of giant panda cultural ecosystem services revealed a feature of spatial heterogeneity, which were distributed in the east of Sichuan. There were more potential service flow paths than realized ones. The public paid more attention to the social media than the actual usage of the signs. The supply of giant panda cultural ecosystem services did not match the spatial distribution of the demand, which was mainly affected by human population distribution, migration, economic development, and policies.

Key words: flagship species, ecosystem service supply and demand, cultural ecosystem service flow, Giant Panda National Park.