Exploring perceptions towards biodiversity conservation in urban parks: Insights on acceptability and design attributes.

Abstract

Green infrastructure has emerged as an opportunity to balance sociocultural and ecological benefits, alongside the potential for biodiversity conservation in cities. However, key design challenges that remain unsolved including 1) how to effectively balance biodiversity conservation and sociocultural benefits, and 2) how user's perception and knowledge may affect the acceptance of conservation interventions in parks. In this study, we used a mixed methods approach in which focus groups were used to explore users' perceptions of landscape attributes, their benefits, biodiversity, climate change, and conservation interventions in parks. This was followed by face-to-face interviews with the broader general public to quantitatively assess perceptions and acceptability for conservation interventions in parks. While plant density and functional diversity were identified as key landscape attributes, trade-offs may occur with other attributes such as multi-functionality and the order of the vegetation. Most conservation interventions had high acceptance levels, where the decrease of grass in parks was the most controversial attribute. All interventions were correlated with the importance of landscape attributes and climate change concerns, but poorly associated with knowledge of native biodiversity. The results support 1) increasing the functional diversity of plants in parks as a way to balance environmental and sociocultural benefits and promote the acceptability of conservation interventions, however such an increase should be linked to designs that respect notions of order and other park uses, and 2) environmental education based on climate change may be the key to improving acceptability of these initiatives.