The educational community and its knowledge and perceptions of native and invasive alien species

Abstract

Environmental education seeks to foster an appreciation for nature and the impact of humans on it while introducing citizens to scientific thinking. Biological invasions affect different aspects of life on earth and mandate urgent management actions. Education and public awareness are strongly recommended for successful prevention and management of invasive alien species (IAS). This work presents a study on knowledge and perception of the educational community of Argentina about native species and IAS. We designed an on-line semi-structured questionnaire to examine perception of the environment, recognition of native species and IAS and awareness about biological invasions. Educators recognised an important number of biotic components, mostly represented by trees, birds and mammals. Recognition of native species and IAS, and awareness of biological invasions were different between NST (Natural Science Teachers) and non-NST. Respondents had different performances when they were exposed to recognising native species though written names or photographs. Out of 532 respondents, 56% knew what biological invasions are, 21% answered "Maybe" and 23% had never heard about them. We need to foster capacity-building and encourage a two-way communication between educators and scientists, formally and informally, to engage the participation of the whole society in recognition, prevention and management of IAS.

Figure 1

Geographic distribution of the questionnaire respondents (red dots). Blue gradient represents the number of inhabitants per province (state). Dark blue represents a higher number meanwhile light blue represents a lower number of inhabitants. Map was created in QGIS version 3.16 https://www.qgis.org/es/site/.

Figure 2

Impact perception of different threats to the environment at local and global scale. Different letters mean a significant difference (Friedman test, P < 0.05).

Figure 3

Respondent perception of biotic components of the environment, (a) frequency of biotic components listed by respondents grouped in eight categories, (b) word cloud of listed biotic components by respondents. Bigger letter size implies more frequency of presence in replies.

Figure 4

Predicted models of native and non-native species (invasive alien species, IAS) recognition from their photos and written names, considering age as an explanatory continuous variable in X axis and Natural Science Teachers (NST) of the respondents as categorical explanatory variable in two colours. Native species are shown on the left of the figure and non-native species on the right. Each frame consists of the respondent's recognition of native species offered graphed as dots (1 = native and 0 = non-native). Curves and confidence bands (95%) came from generalised linear models.

Figure 5

Biological invasions awareness from education community, (a) perception knowledge of Natural Science Teacher (NST) and non-NST, and (b) word cloud from text mining analysis of respondent knowledge about biological invasion. Bigger letter size implies more frequency of presence in replies.