Urbanization directly contributes to the lasting biodiversity crisis by deleting and degrading natural ecosystems, but also indirectly through the increased separation between people and nature. This is profoundly concerning, because interaction with nature leads to a variety of health and well-being benefits, but also since this estrangement can undermine people’s action and public support for conservation goals. Conserving biodiversity in cities was proposed as a win-win solution to jointly achieve ecological and social objectives. But to date, knowledge about the role that biodiversity plays in providing well-being benefits is scarce, inconsistent and biased toward Anglo-Saxon cultures. In this multidisciplinary project we explored how urban biodiversity provides well-being benefits for people visiting public gardens in a in a medium-sized Mediterranean city in Israel. During spring 2015, we sampled communities of birds, butterflies and plants in 24 public gardens and conducted 600 semi-structured interviews (25 per garden) using close-ended questionnaires. We assessed respondents’: (1) self-reported gains to psychological well-being; (2) relatedness to nature; (3) perceived species richness; and (4) ecological knowledge (identifying images of common species). Linear models were used to investigate the relationships between these measures, while accounting for demographic variables.
Results/Conclusions
The majority of respondents expressed preference for species rich gardens, but most people were unable to consciously experience this diversity and benefit from it directly. On average people identified 2.28 species out of twelve suggested species and no significant correlation was found between sampled and perceived species richness. Relationships between measures of well-being, sampled and perceived species richness were mediated by the respondents’ connectedness to nature. Thus, people who perceived themselves as more connected to nature benefited more from species-rich gardens, while there were no, or even negative effects of species richness on well-being benefits for people who were less connected to nature. Accordingly, we only found significant positive correlations between perceived and observed species richness for those respondents who were more connected to nature. Our results demonstrate that the relationship between biodiversity and well-being is not as straightforward as commonly argued. The increased separation between people and nature may account for the fact that many people today do not perceive nor benefit from the interaction with complex (i.e. biodiverse) nature. Thus, enhancing biodiversity in cities might not be enough to also achieve social objectives. The challenge that arises is how to use urban nature resources to enhance positive interactions between people and biodiversity, and the associated societal benefits.