Species diversity enhances perceptions of urban coastlines at multiple scales

Abstract

1. Biodiversity is increasingly understood as an important mediator of human aesthetic appreciation of scenes and landscapes, with implications for cultural services and well-being. However, the generality of biodiversity effects across affective emotions, scales and habitats remains unclear.2. Urban coastal intertidal habitats on seawalls and other artificial structures are expanding worldwide. Despite growing calls to prioritise biodiversity in urban coastal planning and management, the potential co-benefits determined by people's responses to biodiversity in these novel intertidal communities are unexplored.3. We investigated, using image-based questionnaires, how several facets of biodiversity influence how people perceive urban coastal structures at both landscape and close-up scales.4. Species richness strongly enhanced people's ratings of images for aesthetic appeal, interest and calming potential at both scales, but was more pronounced at the close-up scale. Species evenness also increased ratings at the close-up scale, while functional diversity (Rao's Q) was associated with a decline in aesthetic appeal and interest at the close-up scale, indicating that people can disfavour scenes dominated by species with contrasting traits. 5. Analysis of free-text assessments showed that people strongly and positively valued scenes that were perceived to be 'diverse', a response that was much more common when viewing scenes with high species richness. The underlying structure type also clearly affected appraisals, with more obviously engineered structures being perceived to be less natural and thus less desirable. 6. Our results show that biodiversity's effects on aesthetic appreciation extend to multiple affective emotions and to unfamiliar urban intertidal habitats, suggesting that managing these environments for biodiversity may simultaneously support aesthetic, educational and well-being benefits. Nevertheless, the sensitivity of responses to the facet of biodiversity and viewing scale in our results underlines the context dependency and complexity of people's perceptions of urban environments.

Developing Expert Scientific Consensus on the Environmental and Societal Effects of Marine Artificial Structures Prior to Decommissioning

“…The prioritisation of environmental over societal (socio-economic) benefits, irrespective of an individual's background or research interest, is becoming more commonplace as the value of the environment to human health and well-being is increasingly recognised (Soga and Gaston, 2020). Recent studies assessing perceptions of coastal defence structures show that stakeholders prioritise ecological features or benefits over socio-economic or technical aspects of that infrastructure (Evans et al, 2017;Fairchild et al, 2022), despite environmental benefits often being intangible to many (sensu Lim et al, 2020).…”

Coastal greening of grey infrastructure: an update on the state-of-the-art

“…Generally, however, the economic valuation of ecosystem services associated with GGI is in its infancy (e.g. Mehvar et al, 2018), but is nonetheless essential to support or challenge economic justifications by enabling cost-benefit analysis (Fairchild et al, 2022). Economic values include societal benefits via greater knowledge gained of GGI (Strain et al 2019), a perceived increase in naturalness and biodiversity, as well as an association with healthy environments (Fairchild et al, 2021;Salaün et al, 2022).…”

“…-Considering socio-economic benefits Evans et al, 2017;Kienker et al, 2018;Evans et al, 2019;Morris et al, 2019;Strain et al, 2019;Sawyer et al, 2020;Fairchild et al, 2022;Accola et al, 2022a,b;Salaün et al, 2022;Aguilera et al, 2023b). -Consideration of other metrics such as trophic structure (Espinosa et al, 2020;Sedano et al, 2020a,b;Raoux et al, 2022), sedimentation (Bone et al, 2022b;Martinez et al, 2022), transport of wrack (Strain et al, 2018b;Critchley et al, 2021), litter accumulation (Aguilera et al, 2016(Aguilera et al, , 2018(Aguilera et al, , 2023a, use by terrestrial predators or pest species (Aguilera et al, 2023a), early life stage usage (Mafanya, 2020;Reddy, 2022).…”

Coastal residents' affective engagement with the natural and constructed environment

“…While ecologically beneficial solutions were favoured most, opportunities for enhancing the sociocultural value of coastal structures were also mentioned (Evans et al, 2017). Moreover, a study by Fairchild et al (2022) on the public perception of biodiversity on coastal structures found that increased complexity positively affects perception at a range of structural scales, suggesting that ecological enhancements in multi-purpose coastal engineering solutions themselves already increase sociocultural value.…”

“…Moreover, a study by Fairchild et al. (2022) on the public perception of biodiversity on coastal structures found that increased complexity positively affects perception at a range of structural scales, suggesting that ecological enhancements in multi‐purpose coastal engineering solutions themselves already increase sociocultural value.…”