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

alteration of nature for societal ends, and anthropocentric motivations for conservation. We hypothesized that support for using ecosystem restoration to accomplish ES outcomes would depend more strongly on Utilization than Preservation attitudes. In addition to its perceived benefits, restoration has potential to bring about significant dis- services, or negative effects on wellbeing [29]. Restoration activities might increase ecological hazards or nuisances [30, 31], alter a community’s "sense of place" [32, 33], or elicit negative feelings towards wildlife and wilderness, such as dislike, disgust, or fear [34, 35]. We therefore surveyed the public about potential drawbacks of restoration, hypothesizing that the more peo- ple exhibited Biospheric values and Preservationist attitudes, the less they would anticipate negative outcomes from restoration. We also expected that the Utilization axis of attitude, which tracks belief in human dominance over nature, would be associated with a high degree of concern about ecosystem disservices. We also investigated how values and attitudes interact. While the Biospheric value orienta- tion and Preservation axis would be expected to strongly overlap, and the Utilization axis and Egoistic value orientation should correlate, the relationship between an Altruistic value orien- tation and the two attitudes is difficult to predict. We anticipated that attitudes in general would be more closely related to behavioral intention than values [26, 27]. The pro-environmental behavioral intention we measured was willingness to pay (WTP), a

concept from ecological economics. Because our goal was to generalize about preference for restoration outcomes in a national population rather than quantify the exact value of a pro- posed improvement at a specific place, we developed a generic restoration scenario, relevant to a nationwide audience, that showcased the delivery of multiple ecosystem services and biodi- versity attributes. We also created an alternate scenario that promised only benefits to wildlife, and none to people, to see if the dependence of WTP on people’s values and attitudes varied between ES-focused outcomes and biodiversity-focused outcomes. This allowed us to contrast WTP as a relative, rather than absolute, measure of support for different restoration outcomes, avoiding some of the oft-cited reasons for skepticism about WTP as a measure of value (e.g., Venkatachalam, [36]). The word “value” has multiple meanings in the social sciences [37]. The economic concept of WTP is a form of “assigned value,” the value imputed to a good by people’s preferences. Psychology is more concerned with “held values,” or the core, enduring principles at the center of an individual’s worldview. Studies that connect held values with assigned values are rare in the literature, but they are important to understanding conservation as a human endeavor [37, 38]. One reason for this is that social psychology can describe dimensions of motivation typically left unexamined by ecological economics, including moral and ethical motivations,

and may explain why WTP often falls short of predicting actual behaviors [39]. In natural resource management, connecting values, norms, and beliefs to stakeholder preferences is critical to informed decision-making and the social acceptability of land management [40, 41]. It is a truism that many environmental issues and natural resource conflicts are, at bottom, clashes of values [42–44] and that those seeking to solve environmental problems ignore stake- holders’ values and attitudes at their peril [32, 41]. With this work, we wish to shed light on the “big-tent” view of environmental protection, which assumes that the ecosystem services ratio- nale will invite in a new set of supporters with a different mindset. It is important to know if environmental campaigns based on appeals to self-interest or the promise of material benefits will be more or less compelling than moral or ethical arguments [45]. Clarifying the structure of environmental concern, and relating it directly to behavioral intention, should help improve environmental messaging and outreach to stakeholders (e.g., Bright et al. [46]). 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 3 / 15