Species changes are being misperceived - especially when populations increase

Catalina Munteanu , Rita Sousa-Silva, Carsten F Dormann, Johannes Kamp, Theresa Klara Loch, Simon Moesch, Simone Roverelli, Gernot Segelbacher, Ilse Storch

Environmental sciences seek to provide an unbiased quantitative basis for decision making, but conservation and management, as well as personal environmentally-related decisions are often driven by personal perception of the environment. Perception, in turn, is made up of personal experiences, information exchange and media exposure, personal values and beliefs. When documented changes in the natural world are in dissonance with people’s perceptions, unintended environmental consequences (e.g. overlooked degradation, unacknowledged conservation successes) may occur. Here we compare long-term changes in the abundance of trees and birds and personal perception thereof. We identify mismatches in physical and perceived species change and identify personal characteristics behind these mismatches. We find that people were more often wrong than right (66% of the cases) in their assessment of species’ changes that occurred within their lifetime, and change blindness prevailed as a perception phenomenon. Importantly, when species populations increased, respondents often exhibited change blindness, while population declines were more accurately perceived. This finding underlines the importance of relying on hard data rather than perception alone for decision making. Our study has implications for conservation science, restoration and land management practice, for which we recommend that (long-term) decision making should integrate hard monitoring data to mitigate the effects of change blindness and shifted baselines.