Abstract Body

Pollinating insects are an essential component of biodiversity and provide important ecosystem services, such as flower pollination. Cities are becoming increasingly important habitats for wild pollinators and their conservation, including urban gardens. Urban gardeners that create and steward these urban habitats are thereby important actors in urban pollinator conservation. In garden management, ‘pro-pollinator’ management actions may relate to the way that gardeners perceive, experience and relate to nature, but these relationships between people’s perceptions, emotions and nature-relatedness and their gardening activity are largely unclear. To better inform public engagement in pollinator conservation, we examined urban gardeners' identity, emotions, and attitudes toward pollinators and investigated the factors that influence pollinator-friendly behavioral intentions in their gardening practice and their pollinator-friendly behavior in the context of a citizen science project on wild pollinator conservation in community gardens in Berlin, Germany. We surveyed participants and non-participants in the research to investigate how identity, emotions and attitudes may predict behavior, using participation in the CS project as a proxy for pollinator-friendly behavior. We found that positive attitudes towards pollinators and ‚fascination‘ had high predictive potential for behavioural intentions to get involved in pollinator protection. In contrast, ‚interest‘ had high predictive potential to join the CS project. Our study shows the importance of emotions for public engagement in pollinator conservation. Supporting other work in gardens and the cognitive hierarchy of human behavior, we confirm that attitudes and emotions towards pollinators have predictive potential on behavioral intentions on pollinator-friendly behavior. However, also our results show that attitude does not necessarily lead to action, which suggests missing (and needed) interventions.