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

numerous) attitudes mediate the effect of (more general, less numerous) values on environ- mental behaviors. For example, in another study that combined measures of both values and attitudes, Biospheric values had significant indirect, but not significant direct, influences on willingness to pay a premium for organic food [79], leading the authors to conclude that pro- environmental attitudes mediated the effect of Biospheric values. One question about our approach is the appropriateness of using WTP as a measure of sup- port for restoration. We chose WTP because restoration is an intervention that incurs costs and that brings about a change in environmental benefits to people and to habitat, making our scenarios both realistic and akin to a cost-benefit analysis. Because the relationship between values and actions is apt to be mediated by the cost of the action [80], we sought to make the costs both transparent and personal. But non-monetary metrics, such as measures of improved psychological wellbeing as a result of contact with nature, capture different aspects of assigned value [81, 82] and may relate differently to core values and attitudes. Studies of WTP are also plagued by protest responses, which must be discarded for the analysis and thus represent a segment of the public whose values go unexamined. Other researchers have measured assigned value by asking respondents to allocate a budget of value points instead of promising to pay money [83], which may avoid the protest response problem. We also note that we assume

WTP accurately represents support for restoration, but that support could find other outlets besides a monetary donation (e.g., volunteering). We also implicitly assume that values and attitudes are stable, and affect environmental behavior like WTP, but we do not consider the possibility that framing conservation issues in anthropocentric or ES-focused terms has an effect on attitudes or even values—a matter of some debate in the literature, but outside the scope of this paper. Before we can be certain that the ES rationale is successful at garnering more support for conservation, we will need to have a deeper understanding of what that sup- port entails, and a more diverse methodological approach to these questions. Supporting information S1 Appendix. Value orientations and survey items. (PDF) S2 Appendix. Attitude axes, scales, and survey items. Asterisk indicates reverse-coded item. (PDF) S3 Appendix. Survey questions analyzed for this paper. (PDF) Acknowledgments The Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) provided institutional support to VM during this research. Feedback on early versions of the survey from D. Kendal, K. Wil- liams, and focus group participants across Australia is gratefully acknowledged. The comments of two anonymous reviewers greatly improved the manuscript. Author Contributions Conceptualization: Virginia Matzek. Data curation: Virginia Matzek. Formal analysis: Virginia Matzek, Kerrie A. Wilson. Funding acquisition: Virginia Matzek. 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 11 / 15