The diversity of people’s relationships with biodiversity should inform forest restoration and creation

Forest restoration/creation are a policy focus worldwide, with initiatives pledging to plant billions of trees. While there is an emphasis on providing ‘the right tree in the right place’, we need to understand for whom the trees are right. Such social dimensions are frequently overlooked, despite being critical to successful forest restoration/creation. We used Q-methodology to examine what forest biodiversity attributes (e.g. functions, behaviors, colors, smells) people (N=194) relate to and how in Britain. We found that shared public perspectives on biodiversity attributes are multifaceted, influenced by personal experience and vary across taxa. This heterogeneity highlights the importance of gaining a richer understanding of human-nature relationships, as restoration/creation initiatives need deliver biodiverse forests to accommodate the plurality of preferences brought to bear upon them. Based on our findings, emphasizing biodiversity in forest restoration/creation should contribute to greater use of, comfort in, and meaningful engagement with, forests in the future by a wider set of publics.