Public support for restoration: Does including ecosystem services as a goal engage a different set of values and attitudes than biodiversity protection alone?

to influence people’s assessment of the value of an ecosystem service [65–68]. This does not necessarily invalidate the proposition that the subjects are responding to an anthropocentric rationale, because the effect of these scenario differences may be to enhance the respondents’ confidence that the proposed restoration yields a benefit that they understand, desire, and are close enough to receive. But we have no data that can tease apart an independent effect of the sense of place from the existence of the services. Because biodiversity enhancement and eco- system service provision typically go hand in hand, it is difficult to formulate realistic scenarios that can separate the two without introducing different forms of bias, such as place significance. We were surprised by the way Altruistic values explained behavioral intentions and atti- tudes in this study. Other work has frequently shown an influence of altruism on WTP (e.g., Ojea and Loureiro [69]. Although we expected that altruistic individuals would regard restora- tion as beneficial to society at least in the BES option, the Altruistic orientation had no associa- tion with WTP in either scenario. The Altruistic orientation also had no relationship with choosing an ES as a preferred outcome of restoration, nor with seeing a distinction between societal and biospheric benefits of restoration. Instead, and counterintuitively, Altruistic values appeared to make respondents less concerned about negative (societal) impacts of restoration

disservices. It has been shown that Altruistic values and Biospheric values can be difficult to distinguish in relation to pro-environmental beliefs [19, 70], possibly because the Altruistic item set includes aspects of universalism that also strongly relate to a biospheric orientation. In our dataset, the Altruistic orientation was highly positively correlated with Biospheric orienta- tion and the Preservation attitudinal axis, which may explain the generally low explanatory power of altruism throughout our analyses, as well as the result negatively associating Altruis- tic values with the Disservices Index. Ecosystem disservices are poorly studied compared to services [71] and rarely considered simultaneously with benefits [72, 73]. We know of no other research relating core values and environmental attitudes to the perception of disservices, although a few studies have shown that these perceptions may differ cross-culturally [74], between rural and urban dwellers [75], across income and ethnic groups [76], with proximity to the disservice [77], and among people with different pro-environmental behaviors [78]. Given the dearth of work on this topic, we are unable to contextualize our finding that disservices were more concerning to people with Egoistic values and Utilizationist attitudes. It seems clear enough, given that the Utilization scale includes items about “remaking nature. . .when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient for humans” and conservation being placed in opposition to people’s standard of living, that high

Utilization scores would be associated with perception of disservices. However, we found the lack of influence of the Biospheric value somewhat puzzling, in that people who believe nature has intrinsic value should be relatively unconcerned that ecosystems in their natural state have both negative and positive consequences for people. And more Altruistic people, whose values center on maximizing social good, were less likely to agree that restoration could have negative impacts on the economy, fire safety, and other societal issues. One reason for the lack of clarity might be that our DI lumps together disparate concerns that were identified in focus groups as likely concerns about woodland restoration; these concerns may not all engage the same sets of values and attitudes. As ES frameworks for conservation and public investment become more prevalent, we will need to further investigate what shapes the public’s perceptions of disservices. Finally, we found that attitudes were generally more closely related to the behavioral inten- tion of WTP than values, although the overall predictive power of all the psychometric mea- sures was relatively small. Our finding that attitudes were more proximal to behavior is consistent with cognitive hierarchy theory [27], which states that (more specific, more PLOS ONE Values and attitudes towards biodiversity and ecosystem service goals of restoration PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245074 January 19, 2021 10 / 15