An analysis of forest ecosystem services cognition in different environmental attitude

The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between the environmental attitudes and the forest ecosystem services cognitions of the internet users by internet questionnaire. Through factor analysis and cluster analysis methods, four environmental attitude groups of respondents are classified, which are “scientific optimism“, “environmental friendly“, “demand satisfaction“ and “low environmental cognition“. There have different social demographic distributions and different ecosystem service cognitions in these four groups. In general, the respondents who have social experiences and family loads will have more environmental responsibility. On the contrary, the respondents who are young and unmarried will more concern their life satisfaction and neglect the environmental problems. As for the valuation of forest ecosystem services to the different environmental attitude groups, the results show that the importance score of ecosystem services in the group of low environmental cognition is lower than of other groups. Overall, the preferences of respondents’ attitudes about ecosystem services are as follows: soil stabilization, land erosion control and water resource conservation are the most important; biodiversity and carbon sequestration are the second, and, timber production and forest by-production are the last.