Landscape naturalness and restoring benefit: a connection through bird diversity

While urban nature has been reported as positively associated with health and well-being, only a few research focused on the health-beneficial effects of the ecological quality of natural environments. When designing urban green spaces, there is a growing need for establishing rich biodiversity and creating spaces where residents can recover from daily demands and stress. This study aims to understand if human aesthetic perceptions align with ecological quality by exploring the correlation between environmental naturalness, measured by avian diversity, and the restorativeness people experience from the natural landscapes. Additionally, we examine the relationship between the naturalness measured objectively and the naturalness people perceive. We conducted surveys to collect perceptions about natural landscapes in Taipei Metropolitan, Taiwan. We retrieved bird survey data from BBS Taiwan to estimate the naturalness levels of the sites and took photographs on-site to generate the interventions. Participants viewed images and evaluated their restoring and natural perceptions of landscapes. There were 128 participants who answered the survey. Our findings reported landscapes with greater objective naturalness, higher avian species richness and the Shannon diversity index scores, were assessed as more natural and were positively associated with perceived restorativeness. Although bird abundance, another objective naturalness measure did not show significant associations between perceived naturalness and restorativeness. People perceive urban nature supporting diverse bird species as more restorative, having a higher potential to provide restoring effects. This paper suggests future research to have more control over other environmental factors to gain a more detailed understanding of the ecological quality of the environment.