Awareness of Aesthetic and Other Forest Values: The Role of Forestry Knowledge and Education

摘要

Within sustainable forest management (SFM), there has been a much greater emphasis on environmental and economic values than on social values, especially aesthetics. In order to assess the relative importance of people's aesthetic values, we administered public surveys to nonforestry students and to forestry graduate students in the Republic of Korea and Canada. We aimed to identify differences in the perceived importance of forest aesthetic and other values between the groups. While cultural values were generally rated lower than ecological and economic values, forest aesthetic values were rated of relatively high importance among the social values assessed. The forestry experts gave aesthetic values more importance than did the nonforestry groups. Generally, knowledge had more significant effects than country of residence in affecting ratings of the importance of forest aesthetic values.