Abstract

Although the restorative benefits of nature are widely acknowledged, there is a limited understanding of the attributes of natural environments that are fundamental to restorative experiences. Faced with growing human populations and a greater awareness of the wellbeing benefits natural environments provide, park agencies and planners are increasingly challenged with balancing human and ecological outcomes in natural areas. This study examines the physical and experiential qualities of natural environments people referred to when describing their connection to their most valued natural environments in an online questionnaire. Recruited primarily via a public radio program, respondents were asked to identify their favorite places and explain what they loved about those places. Favorite places are considered exemplars of restorative environments and were classified based on an existing park typology. Reasons people liked particular sites were classified into three domains: setting, activity, or benefit. Content analysis was used to identify the attributes most commonly associated with favorite places. These attributes were then related to the four components of restorative environments according to Attention Restoration Theory. In contrast to previous research, we found that “fascination” was the most important component of favorite places. Possible reasons for this contrast, namely, respondents' median age, and the likelihood of a high degree of ecological literacy amongst the study population are discussed. South Australians' favorite environments comprise primarily hilly, wooded nature parks, and botanical gardens, in stark contrast to the vast arid areas that dominate the state. Micro-variables such as birds, plants, wildlife, native species, and biodiversity appear particularly important elements used to explain people's love of these sites. We discuss the implications of these findings and their potential value as an anchor for marketing campaigns seeking to encourage contact with nature, as well as education programs designed to improve people's understanding of important but intangible concepts such as biodiversity. The findings have clear, practical implications for park managers given the modifiable nature of many of the attributes identified as being most important to our respondents, and we believe attention to such elements has the potential to simultaneously enhance people's nature experiences, optimize restorative outcomes, and improve environmental stewardship.

Highlights

  • For many people contact with nature is no longer a by-product of everyday life

  • In contrast to the inclusive and inductive method of content analysis we used when looking at the attributes of favorite places, this time we found that we were more likely to disagree on the category in which certain statements should be placed, in the case of “fascination.” We disagreed on ∼5% of cases but after discussion we developed a shared understanding of how we would classify each component

  • The possible reasons for this contrasting result include the focus on outdoor spaces, the comparably much higher mean age of our respondents, as well as their high level of education. They were sampled from a population likely to have a reasonable knowledge of the natural environment and ecological processes

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Summary

Introduction

For many people contact with nature is no longer a by-product of everyday life. For the vast majority of human history, we relied upon the natural environment for food, water, and shelter in very direct and unambiguous ways, as all species do. We are dependent upon the environment to sustain us, the majority of the world’s population resides in towns and cities (The United Nations, 2014), where they are largely sheltered from the natural processes and ecosystem services that make their existence possible (Miller, 2005). The consequences of this separation between “people” and “nature” are two-fold. A lack of contact with the environment is thought to be a contributing factor to the increasingly poor health and wellbeing of urban inhabitants (Maller et al, 2008), which some scholars suggest is the result of a failure to fulfill our inherent biological need to spend time in nature (Wilson, 1984)

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