Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Soga, Masashi
• Tsuchiya, Kazuaki
• Evans, Maldwyn J.
• Ishibashi, Soki

Titel

The inequalities of the extinction of experience: The role of personal characteristics and species traits in the distribution of people–plant interactions in Japan

Ist Teil von

• Ecological research, 2019-05, Vol.34 (3), p.350-359

Ort / Verlag

Hoboken, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley Online Library Journals Frontfile Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• There is concern about the increasing loss of people's direct interactions with fauna and flora. This extinction of experience has many potential far‐reaching implications for both biodiversity and humans, including the decrease of public support for conservation issues and a reduction in the health benefits that humans experience when interacting with nature. However, knowledge of how experiences with biodiversity are distributed among different sectors of society and the key drivers of this distribution remains poor. Here, we report on the results of a nation‐wide online survey in Japan in which we explored the extent, distribution, and drivers of participant's direct experiences with wild flowering plants. Participants were asked to provide information on their sociodemographics, orientation toward nature, childhood residential environment, and whether they had experienced each of 21 wild flowering plant species. The reported number of wild flowering plant species that participants had experienced varied greatly. Older and female participants and those with childhoods in rural areas and with a greater orientation toward nature experienced a significantly higher number of interactions with flowering plant species. Plant species that prefer roadside environments (compared to grassland/farmland and forest‐dependent species) and are not on the Red List were likely to be experienced by participants. This novel study provides unique information about the interactions of people and the wildlife around them. Such information is crucial for the development of policies and strategies targeted to reduce the ongoing extinction of experience and its negative consequences. In this paper, we report on the results of a nation‐wide online survey in Japan in which we explored the extent, distribution, and drivers of people’s direct experiences with wild flowering plants. We found that people‐plant interactions are not evenly distributed among the population or between flowering plant species. This distribution was determined by factors relating to the personal characteristics of people and the traits of the flowering plant species. This novel study provides unique information about the interactions people and the wildlife around them.