Urban biodiversity, city-dwellers and conservation: how does an outdoor activity day affect the human-nature relationship?

Assaf Shwartz,Alix Cosquer,Alexandre Jaillon,Laurent Simon,Armony Piron,Anne-Caroline Prévot-Julliard,Richard Raymond,Romain Julliard,Brock Fenton

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0038642

Abstract

Urban conservation education programs aim to increase knowledge and awareness towards biodiversity and to change attitudes and behaviour towards the environment. However, to date, few urban conservation education studies have evaluated to what extent these programs have managed to achieve their goals. In this study, we experimentally explored the influence of an urban conservation activity day on individual knowledge, awareness and actions towards biodiversity, in both the short and longer term.We organised three activity days in Paris (France), during which people were invited to participate in urban conservation efforts. Both quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (interviews) methods were employed to investigate the influence of this short urban nature experience on the relationships that city-dwellers develop with nearby biodiversity. We found a strong positive correlation between the levels of participation and an immediate interest towards local urban biodiversity. In the longer term, however, although participants claimed to have gained more knowledge, local awareness and interest for species in their daily environment, they did not seem to extend this interest to participating in other related activities. These results highlight the complexity of validating the effectiveness of this type of education program for achieving conservation goals. Although such a short activity may only have a limited environmental impact, it nevertheless seems to increase people's knowledge, awareness, interest and concern. We therefore believe that when repeated locally, these short conservation education programs could enhance people's experience with nature in cities and achieve conservation goals more fully.

Highlights

Sprawling urban landscapes are a growing threat to biodiversity conservation [1] and are assumed to separate the majority of the world’s population from the biological reality and functions of the natural world [2,3]
We aimed to explore how partaking in a short empirical semi-participative urban conservation activity day can influence individual interest in local urban biodiversity
Most of the 69 people that agreed to answer the questionnaire at the end of the activities (69%) knew about our activity day and had deliberately come to take part in it

Summary

Introduction

Sprawling urban landscapes are a growing threat to biodiversity conservation [1] and are assumed to separate the majority of the world’s population from the biological reality and functions of the natural world [2,3]. Conservation education is a part of environmental education, i.e., a ‘‘learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness about the environment and associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address these challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitment to make informed decisions and take responsible action’’ [7]. In the last two decades, interest in conservation education has increased [10] and various programs have been promoted worldwide in natural history museums, zoos, botanical gardens, natural or semi-natural parks and reserves [11] These programs target different segments of the public (e.g., children, teachers, farmers, and managers), who may have different types of relationships with the environment (e.g., visitors of nature reserves versus residents) [9,12]. These programs use a variety of methods, from presentations of conservation issues, concerns, and practices (e.g., [11,13]) to more integrated programs designed to enable people to participate in conservation research, decisionmaking, and action (e.g., [8,14,15])

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Conclusion