![]() Childhood is the key period to introduce environmental education owing to the strength and lasting quality of an early relationship formed between children and the natural world –. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Įnvironmental education is one of the fundamental tools required to reverse the current trends in biodiversity loss –. Lillywhite while working on this project. FB acknowledges funding by National Science Foundation grant IOS-0926802 to Harvey B. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: This research was supported by a grant from the Conseil Général des Deux-Sèvres and the Région Poitou-Charentes. Received: NovemAccepted: JPublished: August 4, 2011Ĭopyright: © 2011 Ballouard et al. PLoS ONE 6(8):Įditor: Michael Somers, University of Pretoria, South Africa Our results reinforce the message that environmental education must also focus on outdoor activities to develop conservation consciousness and concerns about local biodiversity.Ĭitation: Ballouard J-M, Brischoux F, Bonnet X (2011) Children Prioritize Virtual Exotic Biodiversity over Local Biodiversity. Schoolchildren were more prone to protect “virtual” (unseen, exotic) rather than local animal species. The identification rate of local animals by schoolchildren was meager, suggesting a worrying disconnection from their local environment. Our results suggest that the knowledge of children and their consideration to protect animal are mainly limited to internet contents, represented by a few exotic and charismatic species. Google searching sessions using keywords) was performed to assess which animals are the most often represented. For that, we collected and compared two complementary data sets: 1) a questionnaire was administered to schoolchildren to assess their knowledge and consideration to protect animals, 2) an internet content analysis (i.e. Focusing our analyses on local versus exotic species, we examined the level of knowledge and the level of diversity of the animals that French schoolchildren are willing to protect, and whether these perceptions are mainly guided by information available in the internet. This situation may curb children knowledge and concerns about local biodiversity. In addition, virtual activities are replacing field experiences. ![]() However, most media focus on a few iconic, appealing, and usually exotic species. ![]() Children are strongly influenced by the media, notably the internet, about biodiversity and conservation issues. Environmental education is essential to stem current dramatic biodiversity loss, and childhood is considered as the key period for developing awareness and positive attitudes toward nature.
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