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Urban greenspace provides citizens with important cultural ecosystem services (CES). Identifying landscape features and land use contexts that facilitate CES delivery is critical for guiding urban greenspace management. However, how landscape features and urban context interact with each other in influencing the CES of greenspaces remains unclear. Studies on the CES of patchy urban forests are needed as they are essential urban CES providers, but vulnerable under urban land use pressure. To address these concerns, we compared the CES of 20 urban forest patches in Helsinki, Finland, with five different combinations of landscape features (i.e. size and connectivity) and land use contexts (i.e. surrounding construction density). CES were assessed through an on-site survey on visitors' use, perceptions of CES experience and overall satisfaction, to capture the possible disparities among CES measurements. In larger (>20 ha) forests, visitors were highly satisfied with CES, particularly appreciating the experience of physical health improvement and inspiration through longer and more intense physical uses. Visitors of urban forests in a low construction density context appreciated experiences of cultural heritage, psychological restoration and physical health improvement. Urban forests deliver unique CES characterised by physical use and the benefit of restoration, aesthetics and contact with nature. We suggest that maintaining large urban forests is more effective in promoting CES in high-density areas. In low-density areas, maintaining small forests with open greenspace in the surroundings can also promote CES experiences. We identify management gaps caused by a mismatch between use intensity and CES experiences of urban forests, while both are important in determining people's overall satisfaction. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

While efforts to reverse the current global environmental crisis increase, we are still experiencing unprecedented rates of species' extinctions. Traditional cultural landscapes can potentially play an important role for biodiversity conservation globally. However, these landscapes are threatened by pressures from global to local socio‐economic drivers of change. Many cultural landscapes across the world occur on private land where landowners' environmental stewardship can help support nature conservation. In this study, we applied a place‐based collaborative approach to understand the main aspects underlying landowners' relationship with nature, their perceptions of the local social–ecological context and their vision of a desired future to identify the constraints and opportunities to support voluntary private land conservation. The study was conducted in Uruguay, in a traditional cattle ranching cultural landscape, which is a national priority area for the conservation of biodiversity. In Uruguay, approximately 96% of the land is privately owned, while the National System of Protected Areas covers only ~1% of the land. Our results revealed that landowners had a close relationship with nature and considered themselves and their neighbours as local environmental stewards. Landowners were well aware of the importance of nature contributions to their livelihood and lifestyle and were concerned that rural exodus to urban areas and shrubland encroachment would negatively impact the social–ecological context they value and depend upon. Main needs of landowners to support biodiversity conservation were not primarily motivated by economic interests, but more related to the need for support that could enhance land management and social cohesion. Biodiversity conservation goals in this cultural landscape cannot be pursued in isolation from social and rural development goals. Addressing local needs based on already existing links between nature's contributions and people might help support biodiversity conservation in the area. Failing to understand the context and to recognize locally perceived problems could increase the risk of voluntary conservation failure. Our approach and lessons learned can provide insights to actionable research in other cultural landscapes globally. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

National parks are key for conserving biodiversity and supporting people's well‐being. However, anthropogenic pressures challenge the existence of national parks and their conservation effectiveness. Therefore, it is crucial to assess how people perceive national parks in order to enhance socio‐political support for conservation. User‐generated data shared by visitors on social media provide opportunities to understand how people perceive (e.g. preferences, feelings, opinions) national parks during nature‐based recreational experiences. In this study, we applied methods from automated natural language processing to assess visitors' sentiment when describing experiences in Instagram posts geolocated inside four national parks in South Africa. We found that visitors' sentiment was positive, and mostly included emotions such as joy, anticipation, trust and surprise, with only a small occurrence of posts with negative feelings. Appreciation of nature, in association with a diverse set of other aspects, such as activities, geographical features and tourist attractions, was used to describe experiences related to nature, wilderness, travelling, holidays and adventures. The type of nature‐based experience described by visitors was park specific, revealing different profiles of parks providing wildlife or scenery experiences. Findings support and highlight the societal role of national parks in providing visitors with opportunities to develop positive connections with nature. Social media data may be used to understand visitors' perceptions, and how the image of national parks is constructed by users in the virtual social environment. This may help inform management for promoting a high‐quality tourism experience, as well as conservation marketing aimed at fostering socio‐political support for national parks and their long‐term conservation effectiveness. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.