Socio-ecological mapping generates public understanding of wilding conifer incursion
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Socio-ecological mapping generates public understanding of wilding conifer incursion David Gawith . Alison Greenaway . Oshadhi Samarasinghe . Karen Bayne . Sandra Velarde . Alexey Kravchenko
Received: 2 July 2019 / Accepted: 29 June 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Invasive conifers have the potential to substantially alter natural, cultural, and heritage landscapes in many regions. While much work has been done to understand the impacts of biological invasions on ecosystem services such as water regulation and carbon sequestration, less is known about their impact on sites that have significant cultural value. Assessing these values is complicated by the fact that biological invasions are novel in nature. People are unlikely to have experience with the scales and types of change that concern researchers, meaning that it can be difficult to assess how these changes may impact both the way that people value places and also the specific sites that people value. We assess cultural values in the context of wilding conifers in three landscapes in New Zealand. We mix interview and survey data with scientific projections and visualisation tools based on spatial analysis to explore the interactions between the information that people have about invasives and the impacts that they have on cultural values. We find that concern about wilding
D. Gawith (&) A. Greenaway O. Samarasinghe Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research, 231 Morrin Rd, St Johns, Auckland 1072, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] K. Bayne S. Velarde Scion Research, 49 Sala St, Rotorua 3010, New Zealand A. Kravchenko Aardwolf Research Consulting, Hamilton, New Zealand
conifers increases significantly when people are presented with visual, scientifically credible, projections of incursion. This change demonstrates the importance of communicating credible scenarios for biological invasions when considering how they might affect people’s cultural values. Keywords Wilding conifers Cultural values Involvement Cultural ecosystem services Public perceptions Survey methods
Introduction The management of invasive species is a social as well as a scientific challenge (Lewis et al. 2019; Mitchell et al. 2018; Vila` and Hulme 2017; Vaz et al. 2017). Wider efforts to develop environmentally beneficial policies and management strategies have led to the development of the concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services. These concepts are intended to assist with the consideration of trade-offs in natural resources management by comparing the benefits and drawbacks of environmental conditions that might otherwise be overlooked by markets (Vila` and Hulme 2017). An ecosystem services approach compares different flows of environmental benefits and drawbacks in order to manage these in more coherent ways. While some ecosystem services are easy to quantify, such as the productive value of forestry plantations in
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terms of marketable products, other ecosy
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