Zoos are strong leaders in educating the public to be effective stewards of the environment and passionate conservation actors, but they have the potential to do even more. In particular, the species a zoo chooses to exhibit may have distinct impacts on visitors: featuring animals from around the world could provide broad knowledge, while focusing on a local ecosystem could offer specialized information. The effect of varying emphasis on local species remains uninvestigated, despite countless papers analyzing zoo education. This study addresses this gap through the metric of sense of place, which designates an individual’s connection to a space based on experiences and memories related to people, nature, and other features. This metric was chosen because a stronger ecological sense of place creates more pro-environmental behavior. Based on previous studies, ecological sense of place was measured through Likert scale statements – the more visitors agreed, the stronger their sense of place, and the higher the impact of the zoo’s species on visitors’ attitudes and behaviors. Questions were disseminated through a survey at eight zoos across the country paired geographically to contrast local and exotic species emphases. Zoo employees were interviewed to provide context for the zoo visitor data.
Results/Conclusions
We found that across all zoos and all visitors (local and nonlocal according to a 20-mile radius around the zoo) the type of zoo affected visitors’ sense of place scores (χ2 = 5.094, p = 0.024), with local zoos increasing them by 0.09 ± 0.04. This was done using a linear mixed-effects model, including age, gender, and member status as random variables to take into account other factors that could influence scores. Looking within zoo pairs, we found that zoo type affected sense of place scores between the two zoos in Nebraska (χ2 = 7.392, p = 0.0066, local zoo increase of 0.21 ± 0.07) and the two in Arizona (χ2 = 4.277, p = 0.039, local zoo increase of 0.15 ± 0.07), but not the zoos in New York and California. These results demonstrate a correlation between zoo type and sense of place score, so having more local species on exhibit fosters more attachment and investment in visitors. This information offers suggestions for how zoos could structure their exhibits and their educational efforts, indicating that a stronger focus on local species may be a more effective way to turn zoo visitors into the conservation agents of the future.