| dc.description.abstract | Impacts on parks and protected areas are modifying ecosystems that provide
benefits to sustain human health and well-being. Compelling evidence of ecological and
economic values has been gathered to better understand the implications of these
changing social-ecological conditions; however, social values have received
considerably less attention. There is a strong need to integrate disciplinary perspectives
on the value concept and illustrate the full value of nature experienced through outdoor
recreation activities. My dissertation drew from theoretical frameworks in psychology,
economics, and ecology to better understand the multiple values of Channel Islands
National Park (CINP), California, U.S. Specifically, I examined “held” value
orientations, “assigned” values of ecosystem services, and ecological values of the
CINP. In first of three papers, I tested the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory of
environmentalism to determine the psychological processes driving low-impact behavior
among outdoor recreationists. I observed that behavioral engagement was more strongly
related to biospheric-altruistic held values than egoistic concerns. Also, moral norm
activation was a direct antecedent to behaviors that minimized the spread of invasive
species, degradation of archeological artifacts, and overfishing in marine protected areas.
In the second paper, I investigated how environmental worldview shaped the spatial
dynamics of assigned values for ecosystem services on Santa Cruz Island within the
CINP. Using Public Participation Geographic Information Systems methods, I found
that held value orientations (i.e., biocentrism, anthropocentrism) manifested different
values ascribed to marine and terrestrial environments. In the third paper, I compared
assigned biodiversity values to spatially-explicit measures of ecosystem structure and
function using a Social Values for Ecosystem Services (SolVES) mapping application
and Maximum Entropy modeling. My results showed that distance to features relevant
for park management, carbon sequestration, species richness, elevation, vegetation
density, and several categories of land cover predicted the locations and intensity of
preferences for biodiversity on Santa Cruz. | en |
