Mapping citizens' attitudes towards soil ecosystem services: A case study from New South Wales, Australia.

Soils deliver multiple ecosystem services (ES) that are essential for life on Earth, such as – among others - water and climate regulation, nutrient cycling, and biomass production. Understanding society's perception of the benefits provided by soils can provide valuable insights regarding the human-nature relation. However, despite soil's many contributions to human well-being, little is known about the social aspects of the ecosystem and the way society feels connected to it. Here, we contribute to addressing this issue by investigating the attitudes and perceptions of citizens of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, towards soil ES through the use of items drawn from the Norm Activation Model (NAM) and The New Environmental Paradigm scale (NEP). We found that citizens are highly concerned about environmental issues and have strong moral obligation values to contribute to soil conservation, which suggests high connectivity between citizens and soil. We explored the spatial distribution of the attitudes and found that people living in proximity to each other perceive similar benefits from the ecosystem and exhibit similar trends of attitudinal patterns. We also identified that people's connectivity to soil might depend on the level of exposure to agricultural activities and socioeconomic characteristics. Our findings contribute to the connectivity dimension of the Soil Security framework, constitute a step further to assess and map soil from a social perspective, and provide crucial information for governments and policy-makers to develop policies that promote sustainable use of soils.