The role of diverse cultural identities in the perceived value of urban forests in Melbourne, Australia, and implications for urban ecosystem research and practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Urban nature management is usually guided by the most common, frequently mentioned, or easily elicited perceptions expressed by a dominant cultural group. This is unlikely to encourage widespread community support or foster urban nature stewardship in the long run. Considering how people representing diverse cultural identities perceive the value of urban nature is key to meeting diverse community needs. In this study we explore how people not born in Australia, people who speak a language-other-than-English (LOTE), and people who self-identify as speaking a minority language, perceive the value of urban treed sites, trees at these sites, and the wildlife at these sites. We used an intercept questionnaire to collect empirical perception data, delivered in 12 different sites, including parks and streets, located in and near the Greater Melbourne Area, an ethno-culturally diverse urban area in the state of Victoria, Australia. We analyzed 1127 responses collected over 2 years using contingency- and regression-based procedures. We found that people who were not born in Australia rated the importance of treed sites and trees at these sites higher than other respondents, and LOTE respondents rated the importance of treed sites and trees at these sites lower than other respondents. Also, LOTE and some language minority respondents associated more psychological themes (i.e., stress reduction, feeling good) with treed sites than other respondents. These differences account for the influence of other cognitive, behavioral, and social-ecological context factors, such as nature relatedness, knowledge of trees, exposure to trees, demographics, and type of site (i.e., parks or streets). We discuss what these results mean for urban nature research with consideration of diverse cultural communities in cities, including integrating cultural diversity as a complement to the dominant consideration of socioeconomic patterns for understanding urban nature dynamics, accounting for conflicting values, and better communicating with and engaging these communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".