Psychological benefits of greenspace increase with biodiversity

TLDR

Urbanization concentrates people in cities, increasing isolation from nature, while public greenspaces provide measurable physical and psychological benefits. Psychological benefits from urban greenspaces rise with species richness, and users can roughly gauge richness by taxonomic group, suggesting that enhancing biodiversity in these spaces boosts human well‑being.

Abstract

The world's human population is becoming concentrated into cities, giving rise to concerns that it is becoming increasingly isolated from nature. Urban public greenspaces form the arena of many people's daily contact with nature and such contact has measurable physical and psychological benefits. Here we show that these psychological benefits increase with the species richness of urban greenspaces. Moreover, we demonstrate that greenspace users can more or less accurately perceive species richness depending on the taxonomic group in question. These results indicate that successful management of urban greenspaces should emphasize biological complexity to enhance human well-being in addition to biodiversity conservation.