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

by the prospect of restoration providing ES outcomes than of restoration solely aimed at biodi- versity. However, it would be incorrect to say that support for restoration was not biophilic or ecocentric in the BES scenario, because the no-use Preservationist environmental attitude strongly predicting higher WTP in both scenarios, while the pro-use Utilizationist attitude negatively influenced WTP for BES. Also, the beta weights for Egoistic values in both scenarios are quite similar, even if the Egoistic value is not significant in the BO scenario. Though many studies have related values and/or attitudes to respondents’ preference for environmental protection over a business-as-usual scenario, we know of only two that distin- guish biodiversity protection and ecosystem service provision within a conservation scenario, as we did. Hicks and colleagues (2015) analyzed the values invoked by Pacific Island fishers for different ecosystem attributes and found that preferences were distributed across a diverse array of human values. Ecosystem characteristics associated with self-transcendent values included sanitation, protection from coastal hazards, and ecological function, while fishery goods and services were associated with self-enhancement, and were given the highest priority [50]. In another such study, attitudes among visitors to a California preserve influenced which ecosystem services and benefits they considered most valuable [51]. Two groups were identi- fied from their responses to the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) survey, strong

biospheric and neutral NEP. The neutral NEP rated recreation higher, and biodiversity and scientific value lower, as components of value of an island preserve. This work, like ours, pro- vides intriguing evidence that different assigned values for ecosystems engage different core values. We can also make inferences relevant to our findings from psychometric studies that did not explicitly contrast biodiversity protection and ecosystem service provision, but instead compared particular management outcomes congruent with use and non-use value. For exam- ple, Swedish forest owners were surveyed about their attitudes on managing forests to empha- size preservation of ecological value, outdoor recreation, or timber production—land-use options which could be characterized as biodiversity protection, ecosystem service, and eco- nomic exploitation, respectively [52]. As might be expected, having self-transcendent values and a high NEP score were both positively associated with the ecological management attitude and negatively associated with the economic management attitude. But the ecosystem service attitude fell somewhere in the middle, with weaker dependence on NEP and no significant relationship with self-transcendent values. This is consistent with our finding that ES-focused management relies less heavily on an ecocentric worldview than does pure preservation. Recreation as an ecosystem service was also the focus of a survey of winter visitors to Yel- lowstone National Park [53], in which people whose attitudes aligned with a highly biospheric

axis (“naturalists”) had different opinions on park management issues from another group whose attitudes were characterized as “human-oriented.” Generally, naturalists favored man- agement actions that would restrict human use of the park, while the human-oriented group was much more likely to desire expansion of recreation opportunities and amenities. Similarly, among Swedish respondents, the influence of norms and beliefs on support for conservation differed between wilder ecosystems with high ecological value and a cultivated town park val- ued mostly for recreation [54], with support for the town park being much more weakly asso- ciated with biospheric values and norms. For residents of Norway shown photos of various landscapes, wildland attractiveness was associated with the ecocentric value orientation, and farm attractiveness was associated with the anthropocentric value orientation [55]. In all of these studies, valuation of nature as a wilderness with high ecological value was more strongly aligned with a biospheric orientation than was valuation of nature as a place that humans enjoy. 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 8 / 15