Understanding relational values in cultural landscapes in Romania and Germany

<p>Relational values recently emerged as a concept to comprehensively understand and communicate the many values of nature. Relational values can be defined as preferences and principles about human-nature relationships and focus both on human-nature connections, as well as human-human connections.</p> <p>Here, drawing on 819 face-to-face questionnaires, we analysed relational, intrinsic and instrumental values across a total of six agricultural landscapes in Transylvania (Romania) and Lower Saxony (Germany). The landscapes described a gradient of land use intensity, within and across the countries.</p> <p>Our results suggest a bundling of values into four groups: those concerned with individual cognition (including intrinsic values), those that focus on nature as a place for social interaction and relaxation, those that capture cultural identity and spiritual values and one bundle that only includes instrumental values.</p> <p>These different values, in turn, were strongly related to (i) respondents' attitudes towards environmental conservation and the (ii) frequency with which respondents used nature as a resource. </p> <p>Instrumental values have the tendency to be inversely related with relational values and were found to increase with the land use intensity of the focal landscapes.</p>