Explore the vast range of titles available.

The link between nature and human wellbeing is well established. However, few studies go beyond considering the visual and auditory underpinnings of this relationship, even though engaging with nature is a multisensory experience. While research linking smell to wellbeing exists, it focuses predominantly on smells as a source of nuisance/offence. Smells clearly have a prominent influence, but a significant knowledge gap remains in the nexus of nature, smell, and wellbeing. Here, we examine how smells experienced in woodlands contribute to wellbeing across four seasons. We show that smells are associated with multiple wellbeing domains, both positively and negatively. They are linked to memories, and specific ecological characteristics and processes over space/time. By making the link between the spatiotemporal variability in biodiversity and wellbeing explicit, we unearth a new line of enquiry. Overall, the multisensory experience must be considered by researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and planners looking to improve wellbeing through nature.

Forest restoration/creation is a policy focus worldwide, with initiatives pledging to plant billions of trees. While there is an emphasis on providing “the right tree in the right place,” we need to understand for whom the trees are right. Such social dimensions are frequently overlooked, despite being critical to successful forest restoration/creation. We used Q‐methodology to examine what forest biodiversity attributes (e.g., functions, behaviors, colors, smells) people (N = 194) relate to and how in Britain. We found that shared public perspectives on biodiversity attributes are multifaceted, influenced by personal experience and vary across taxa. This heterogeneity highlights the importance of gaining a richer understanding of human–nature relationships, as restoration/creation initiatives need to deliver biodiverse forests to accommodate the plurality of preferences brought to bear upon them. Based on our findings, emphasizing biodiversity in forest restoration/creation should contribute to greater use of, comfort in, and meaningful engagement with, forests in the future by a wider set of publics.

Listening is a pervasive and significant act of conservation research and praxis, mattering greatly for the realisation of conservation agendas, not least its ambitions to be outward looking and inclusive in approach. Yet, the value and role of listening has been barely explored in a sustained and reflexive way. This paper is a preliminary schematic of what it might mean to attend to the act of listening, set within the context of a larger field of listening scholarship as well as more specific manoeuvres to embed relational approaches into the study of people and nature interactions. We explore what it means to 'listen well' within the context of conservation, highlighting the importance of recognising listening as a relationship and our positions and power within those relationships; the need to care for the relationship through respect and empathy; and the building of inclusive relationships of listening by attending to how space and time influences understanding. We offer examples of how researchers and practitioners can create spaces for listening, illustrating our discussion with personal reflections about listening practices gained through our various conservation and research careers. We provide approaches and ideas which help the reader—academic and practitioner—to both understand and articulate the value of listening in conservation and relational values of nature. We hope to inspire the wider use of listening‐based approaches in conservation research and practice, and the recognition and support from senior managers and funders of what is needed to promote long‐term and meaningful relationships between people and nature. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Understanding the factors shaping human perceptions on a species reintroduction can facilitate project success and foster human–wildlife coexistence. Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx has been proposed as a candidate for reintroduction in Scotland, after having gone extinct in Britain. To identify perceived impacts of a lynx reintroduction among stakeholders and to explore factors shaping these perceptions, we conducted 34 unstructured interviews with stakeholders within and in potentially suitable habitat for a lynx reintroduction and surrounding areas in Scotland. We adopted an interpretative, grounded theory approach and identified themes from the interview data. The same perceived impacts were framed to both oppose and support a lynx reintroduction, which typically reflected pre‐existing tensions between stakeholders and indicated opinion and affective polarization. A combination of individual experiences, human–human relationships, and human–wildlife relationships was pivotal in shaping perceptions. With these insights, conflict mitigation mechanisms can be developed before initiating a conservation project, such as the reintroduction of a species. We suggest that as a first step in a conservation project, relationships are built with stakeholders and immediately seeking to change opinions should be avoided, which can be counterproductive. To identify perceived impacts of a lynx reintroduction among stakeholders and to explore factors shaping these perceptions, we conducted 34 unstructured interviews with stakeholders within and in potentially suitable habitat for a lynx reintroduction and surrounding areas in Scotland. The same perceived impacts were framed to both oppose and support a lynx reintroduction, which typically reflected pre‐existing tensions between stakeholders and indicated opinion and affective polarization. We suggest that as a first step in a conservation project, relationships are built with stakeholders and immediately seeking to change opinions should be avoided, which can be counterproductive.

Researchers, practitioners and policymakers have widely documented the multifarious ways that nature influences human well‐being. However, we still have only a limited understanding of how the public interact with, respond to and talk about attributes of biodiversity. We used image‐based Q methodology to explore the shared and contrasting perspectives people hold for biodiversity. This approach is a powerful way of allowing people to articulate what is, or is not, important to them, free from constraints associated with statement‐based stimuli. We used British woodlands as a study system, as they are accessible and well‐visited by the public. The elements of biodiversity incorporated in the Q methodology represented vertebrates, invertebrates, trees and understorey plants and fungi. The shared public perspectives varied, and the reasons underpinning those perspectives were rich and diverse. People articulated reasons related to an array of biodiversity attributes (e.g. functions, behaviours, colours, smells, shapes). Many of the perspectives transcended specific species or taxonomic groups. Although woodlands were used as a study system, people referenced perceptions and experiences external to this habitat (e.g. within their gardens) and associated with their everyday lives. Cultural influences and memories linked to particular people and places were also prominent. Few of the shared perspectives map onto the objective measures and dimensions that researchers use to describe and categorise biodiversity (e.g. rarity, ecosystem service provision). A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Agricultural landscapes represent critical contexts for advancing policy objectives related to tree cover expansion. This paper explores how farmers' values influence their willingness or ability to grow trees on farms. Research is based on 49 interviews and two focus groups with farmers in England and draws on two social science research traditions to devise an analytical framework based on four value orientations—instrumental, relational, expressive and intrinsic. Analysing the data through the lens of these value orientations reveals how tree growing both aligns with and diverges from farmers' values. While growing trees is not a primary occupational goal for most farmers, neither is it inconsistent with the worldviews of farmers navigating the realities of an agricultural landscape increasingly oriented towards the provision of public goods. Instrumental values, particularly economic considerations, play a prominent role in farmers' decisions about growing trees. However, relational and expressive dimensions—including affiliations with particular trees, landscape aesthetics and opportunities for personal fulfilment—significantly shape farmers' perspectives. Intrinsic values, linked to an appreciation for the natural world and the farming way of life, further enrich these dynamics. Policy and practice implications. Our findings emphasise the importance of engaging with the full spectrum of values that underpin farmers' decision‐making about trees. The four value orientations provide a framework for understanding where, how and why trees matter to farmers. Policymakers and practitioners can use this framework to align initiatives, communications and support mechanisms with farmers' priorities, fostering greater integration of trees into agricultural landscapes. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Pathways to sustainability require a broader and fuller representation of the multiple values of nature in policy and practice. In this People and Nature special feature entitled ‘The Multiple Values of Nature’, researchers interpreted all three key words differently: multiple, values and nature. The articles also engaged variously with concepts, theory, practice and data. In the face of this diversity, some see a burgeoning field and others see a mess. In this editorial, we characterize the diversity of these contributions and consider whether the field is poised to become mainstream. Specifically, we ask what might be limiting its efforts to unsettle the dominance of economic valuation. Like the broader field, the articles engage little with theory, and only one paper engaged with a theory of value (the dominant ‘utility theory’, rejecting a component of it). All articles thus seemed dissatisfied or disengaged with existing theories of value; this suggests that popular theories of value cannot properly account for the diversity of ways that people value and relate to nature. Perhaps there is a fundamental lack in how we understand value in any context (not just nature). As this fledgling field matures, we argue that building theory is key. Specifically, there is a need to articulate a theory of value to accommodate the multiple values of nature, which relates the various concepts to empirics, and which serves as a foundation to guide practice. To facilitate this theory development, we outline a set of ways that a new theory of value would need to differ from the dominant economic (utility) theory of value in order to explain what is known about the multiple values of nature. Whether by illustrating and enlivening an existing alternative theory of value or by inspiring a new theory, perhaps this fledgling field of the multiple values of nature is poised to disrupt much broader understandings of what matters to people and why. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the 'spatialities of cinema' across the social sciences and humanities, yet to date critical inquiry has tended to explore this issue as a question of the 'city' and the 'urban'. For the first time, leading scholars in geography, film and cultural studies have been drawn together to explore the multiple ways in ideas of cinema and countryside are co-produced: how 'film makes rural' and 'rural makes film'. From the expanse of the American great west to the mountainous landscapes of North Korea, Cinematic Countrysides draws on a range of popular and alternative film genres to demonstrate how film texts come to prefigure expectations of rural social space, and how these representations come to shape, and be shaped by, the material and embodied circumstances of 'lived' rural experience. At the heart of this volume's varied apprehensions of the 'cinematic countryside' is a concern to argue that ideas of rurality in film are central to wider questions of 'modernity' and 'tradition', 'self' and 'other', 'nationhood' and 'globalisation', and crucially, ones that are central to an account of the 'cinematic city'.