One size does not fit all: the complex relationship between biodiversity and psychological well-being

Abstract: Enhancing urban biodiversity is increasingly advanced as a nature-based solution that can help align public health and biodiversity conservation agendas. Yet, research on the relationship between biodiversity and psychological well-being provides inconsistent results. The goal of this interdisciplinary research was to understand how components of psychological well-being of green space users relate to species richness and abundance. Additionally, we investigated how key characteristics that shape the way people interact with nature, affinity towards nature and ecological knowledge, moderate the well-being biodiversity relationship. We sampled bird, butterfly and plant in 24 urban gardens in Israel and distributed 600 close-ended questionnaires in-situ to measure psychological well-being, nature-relatedness, ecological knowledge, perceived species richness and demographics. Components of psychological well-being were mostly associated with perceived species richness and to lesser extent with actual species richness and abundance for all taxa. Nature-relatedness moderated these relationships. Respondents with high nature-relatedness demonstrated positive well-being-richness relationships, while those with intermediate, or low, nature-relatedness showed no, or even negative relationships, respectively. Opposite relationships were recorded for bird abundance, i.e., negative versus positive well-being-abundance relationship for individuals with high or low nature-relatedness, respectively. Overall, individuals demonstrated poor ecological knowledge of species and this variable moderated the relationships between well-being components and perceived butterfly richness and bird abundance. Our results demonstrate that one-size-does-not-fit-all when considering the relationship between psychological well-being and biodiversity and that affinity to nature is a key moderator for this relationship.