Socio-ecological mapping generates public understanding of wilding conifer incursion

Invasive conifers have the potential to substantially alter natural, cultural, and heritage landscapes in many regions. While much work has been done to understand the impacts of biological invasions on ecosystem services such as water regulation and carbon sequestration, less is known about their impact on sites that have significant cultural value. Assessing these values is complicated by the fact that biological invasions are novel in nature. People are unlikely to have experience with the scales and types of change that concern researchers, meaning that it can be difficult to assess how these changes may impact both the way that people value places and also the specific sites that people value. We assess cultural values in the context of wilding conifers in three landscapes in New Zealand. We mix interview and survey data with scientific projections and visualisation tools based on spatial analysis to explore the interactions between the information that people have about invasives and the impacts that they have on cultural values. We find that concern about wilding conifers increases significantly when people are presented with visual, scientifically credible, projections of incursion. This change demonstrates the importance of communicating credible scenarios for biological invasions when considering how they might affect people’s cultural values.