Fig 1.
Study region and sampling design: A) Climate zones based on mean annual air temperature (reference period 1981–2010, DWD), B) land-use zones are based on CORINE Land Cover 2012 C) Sampling gradient shown for the 60 focal quadrants with filled colour from A) and border colour from B). Locations of surveys are shown for farmers (orange triangles: on-site locations of Offices of Food, Agriculture and Forestry; grey regions: online distribution via Offices and Agricultural Associations), foresters (online distribution via Offices and Forestry Associations to private and corporate foresters; 20 state foresters per climate zone were addressed via the Bavarian State Forestry BaySF, not depicted), citizens (black circles, urban quadrants with r = 1.5 km, non-urban quadrants r = 3 km to account for different population densities; orange hatches: location of editorial offices of newspapers that invited readers to participate in the survey via articles, r = 10 km is not true to scale of the newspapers’ range of influence); nature managers were contacted independent of their location within the study region and are thus not shown in C. D) Location of the study region Bavaria (green), in Germany and Central Europe.
Fig 2.
Residence of respondents that answered the question regarding their perceived importance of ES (n = 2343, as 675 respondents did not provide their postal code), differentiated by societal actor group.
Coloured polygons represent the postal code areas.
Table 1.
Explanatory and response variables used in the analysis.
Fig 3.
Overall perceived importance per ecosystem service ES (P: provisioning services, R: regulating services, C: cultural services and S: supporting services).
The respective question was “How important are the following services of landscape and nature?” Segments in turquoise stand for the percentage share of answers in the important or very important category. Indifferent answers are split equally around zero percent. Segments in brown represent the percentage share of answers in the unimportant or very unimportant categories. Numbers on the right side of each row represent the number of responses for each respective ecosystem service. The high number of responses (i.e. 20508), is due to aggregated ES answers; each of the 3,018 respondents could give an answer for seven ES.
Fig 4.
Perceived importance per ecosystem service and societal actor (i.e., citizens, farmers, foresters, and nature managers).
The index of disagreement shows differences between societal actors in perceived importance of ecosystem services.
Fig 5.
Correlation plots between ecosystem services and gradient variables.
The grey rectangle frames the area of potential correlation between ecosystem services perceptions and gradient variables. Spearman correlation is calculated. Only significant correlations at p < 0.05 are shown, insignificant relationships are left blank.
Table 2.
Coefficients from the Generalized Linear Models.
The coefficients for the group of farmers, foresters, and nature managers are to be interpreted relative to the group of citizens. The reference level for middle secondary school is the higher secondary school category. Knowledge on ES was never significant and is therefore not shown. Spatial distributions of residuals are shown in S31-S40 Figs in S1 File.