Beaver (Castor fiber) translocations are accelerating across Britain as part of nature restoration efforts. While research on beaver effects on ecosystem services in Britain has progressed, our understanding of cultural ecosystem services of beaver-modified landscapes remains limited. We used a standardised questionnaire with 166 respondents across six beaver-modified landscapes in Scotland and England to understand cultural ecosystem services and disservices provided to landscape visitors. Our findings demonstrate that beaver-modified landscapes provide significant cultural ecosystem services to visitors. Respondents were drawn to beaver landscapes for recreation, educational opportunities, landscape aesthetics, inspiration and social relations. Positive aesthetic perceptions and positive emotions were significantly higher among women than men, environmental NGO members than non-members and respondents on guided beaver tours than those visiting independently. We recommend that beaver management strategies support access to these cultural values through accessible infrastructure, educational opportunities, benefit-sharing mechanisms and connections to health and wellbeing initiatives, while recognising that realising cultural benefits also requires addressing disbenefits that arise locally and accommodating plural, sometimes competing, values, as essential aspects of socially just nature conservation.
Given the increasing biodiversity loss in many countries across the world, it is high time to devise public policies to protect and enhance biodiversity. In democratic countries, public acceptability of these policies is crucial, given that policymakers will be reluctant to adopt policy instruments that are not supported by their electorate. However, evidence on public opinion regarding biodiversity policy in general, and regarding specific policy instruments in particular is still scarce. This study reports the results of a public opinion survey of 1,765 Swiss citizens, featuring an embedded experiment. Pre-registered hypotheses were partially supported. We find that, while the public seems generally aware of the biodiversity crisis (81.8% feel concerned about biodiversity loss), decline is perceived more severe at geographically distant scales than locally. Nevertheless, there are clear preferences for biodiversity-positive policies when outcomes are framed explicitly: targeting of relevant sectors, as well as an increase of protected areas are important to the public. Preference is lower for policies featuring instruments that are viewed as intrusive, but an awareness raising treatment strengthened support for more ambitious policies.
It is commonly argued that encouraging people to spend time in nature and appreciate nature is an important conduit for encouraging engagement in conservation stewardship actions. However, there is limited data available to help us understand how those ‘not yet engaged’ in conservation actually perceive nature-based settings and possibilities for nature stewardship. Here we address this gap by recruiting ‘not yet engaged’ individuals and providing guided nature experiences, followed by in-situ interviews to examine participant perceptions of these nature experiences and stewardship actions. Qualitative analysis integrated Kellert’s value typology and Value‑Beliefs‑Norm theory to assess how nature was valued, and ‘ingredients’ for stewardship action. We found that all participants described a positive appreciation of nature, reflected by naturalistic and aesthetic value orientations. However, participants were less likely to demonstrate other ingredients for stewardship, including awareness of actions that they could perform, and sense of responsibility or moral obligation to take specific actions. These findings suggest that programs aiming to promote conservation actions should not rely on encouraging nature appreciation in isolation, but also foster awareness of available actions and a sense of personal responsibility.
Urban waterscapes hold multiple values for local people and are important for ensuring the future sustainability of cities. However, few studies have examined the potential of plural values of waterscapes for mitigating urban sustainability challenges, and even fewer in the Global South. To address this gap, we applied a plural value approach to capture perceptions of both well-maintained and neglected waterscapes by 616 urban dwellers from four Indian megacities. We analysed the associations among perceived values, sustainability challenges, and socio-economic characteristics of the respondents through redundancy analysis (RDA). Our study found that relational and intrinsic values of waterscapes were more important to people than instrumental values. Older and long-term residents prioritised instrumental values and social responsibility. Frequent waterscape visitation, higher education, and income were associated with biodiversity and aesthetic values. This study highlights the importance of incorporating relational and intrinsic values into sustainable water governance.
Freshwater ecosystems are among the most biodiverse and functionally important environments on Earth, yet they are experiencing rapid degradation due to a complex mix of environmental and human-induced pressures. While international and European policies aim to address this degradation, restoration efforts are often hindered by narrow spatial scales, lacking a large-scale context and management strategies. This study presents a novel mixed factual and conceptual framework to guide large-scale freshwater restoration across Europe through the development of a Restoration Potential Index (RPI). The RPI is a pan-European tool designed to prioritize freshwater restoration, developed based on three principles: i) restored areas offer varying ecosystem services (ES) co-benefits, assessed using the Ecosystem Services Assessment Indicator (ESA), which combines Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and GIS; ii) restoration efforts face constraints in areas with intense land use and heavy alteration; iii) areas within conservation networks benefit from stronger legal support, enabling restoration. Constraints and enablers are modeled using geoprocessing tools, and the RPI is generated by aggregating these three factors through radar graph analysis. The RPI identifies very low to very high-priority regions where restoration efforts are likely to be both impactful and resource-efficient. We found that 17,5% of the units of analysis show high to very high restoration potential. As RPI provides a spatial decision-support tool to guide the prioritization of restoration actions, the results of the study support strategic, river landscape-level planning to optimize ecological outcomes and long-term societal benefits, aligning with EU environmental objectives and promoting impactful restoration interventions.
