Biodiversity conservation and the public's preference and acceptance in Singapore

Abstract

Singapore is a nation with a rich biodiversity of plants and animals. Conserving and bringing nature into city is an important issue. Besides ecologists, more and more planners nowadays also show great concern in biodiversity conservation, and the possible influence of ecological strategies on the visual quality of landscape is noted. However, there has been no systematic study of the feasible approaches to incorporate conservation and enhancement of biodiversity into the publica??s preference and acceptance for landscapes in Singapore. The aims of this thesis are to conceptually discuss how to enhance biodiversity and to explore the potential publica??s preference for landscapes created and maintained by these approaches in Singapore. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part reviews the biodiversity conservation and enhancement approaches, which can be helpful to the city planners and landscape architects, and discusses the existing situation in Singapore. These approaches, i.e. (1) conservation of biodiversity, (2) restoration and creation of habitats and (3) linkage among habitats are summarized. As far as Singapore is concerned, the key strategy is to conserve the most important biodiversity habitats. Conceptual assessment of the existing vegetations in Singapore was done through the analysis of literature, and the biodiversity habitats with different importance were identified on the green map. These habitats should be linked by green corridors, and the ecological quality of these corridors should be good enough to ensure their function. Restoration of damaged ecosystem and creation of new habitats are helpful to the sustainability of the conserved habitats. From the ecological perspective, restoration of some secondary forests in parks and along green corridors is a possible task, and can be widely carried out around Singapore. The second part of the thesis studies the publica??s acceptance to biodiversity habitats designed and managed by the approaches discussed above. Case studies were conducted in three regional parks, namely West Coast Park, Labrador Park and Clementi Woods. All of them are not only popular with users but also have some natural areas. The study includes two parts. The first part investigated the park usersa?? view of the existing natural areas in the parks through a questionnaire survey, and the second part assessed the publica??s preference for alternative edge types of secondary forest which are supposed to be restored in the parks. The study results reveal that in Singapore biodiversity habitats in regional parks are acceptable to park users. The existing natural areas, such as bird sanctuaries, in regional parks are preferred by the public to mowed turf, and adding more natural areas to promote biodiversity in regional parks is acceptable to park users. The study results show that respondents regard natural areas as important parts of the parks, and most of them like these natural landscapes. Furthermore, although from classical landscape aestheticsa?? point of view, natural landscapes may be perceived of low aesthetic values and are less acceptable in urban parks, the study results shows that adding more natural greeneries in regional parks is acceptable, and the publica??s attitude to naturally-growing greeneries is positive. The publica??s preference for secondary forest with different edge types indicates that visual quality of secondary forest with hard edge is the same as that with the turf view, and the soft edge is even more preferred by the public. But the scenery quality of the secondary forest with natural soft edges is less preferred than the turf view.