Children's attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas.

Clicks: 362
ID: 55712
2019
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Steady

Ranked #33 of 189 articles by views in PeerJ

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 189 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Sign in to mint
Abstract
The decline in the number of hours Americans spend outdoors, exacerbated by urbanization, has affected people's familiarity with local wildlife. This is concerning to conservationists, as people tend to care about and invest in what they know. Children represent the future supporters of conservation, such that their knowledge about and feelings toward wildlife have the potential to influence conservation for many years to come. Yet, little research has been conducted on children's attitudes toward wildlife, particularly across zones of urbanization. We surveyed 2,759 4-8th grade children across 22 suburban, exurban, and rural schools in North Carolina to determine their attitudes toward local, domestic, and exotic animals. We predicted that children who live in rural or exurban areas, where they may have more direct access to more wildlife species, would list more local animals as "liked" and fewer as "scary" compared to children in suburban areas. However, children, regardless of where they lived, provided mostly non-native mammals for open-ended responses, and were more likely to list local animals as scary than as liked. We found urbanization to have little effect on the number of local animals children listed, and the rankings of "liked" animals were correlated across zones of urbanization. Promising for conservation was that half of the top "liked" animals included species or taxonomic groups containing threatened or endangered species. Despite different levels of urbanization, children had either an unfamiliarity with and/or low preference for local animals, suggesting that a disconnect between children and local biodiversity is already well-established, even in more rural areas where many wildlife species can be found.
Reference Key
schuttler2019childrenspeerj Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Schuttler, Stephanie G;Stevenson, Kathryn;Kays, Roland;Dunn, Robert R;
Journal PeerJ
Year 2019
DOI
10.7717/peerj.7328
URL
Keywords
Biodiversity Children Attitudes urbanization animals native

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.