Agathe Colleony

• Postdoctoral fellow in conservation sciences
• PostDoc Position at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Biodiversity conservation is increasingly recognized as a main challenge for the sustainability agenda. With humans at the epicenter of the biodiversity crisis, conserving nature requires changes in individual behavior. This study reveals gaps regarding the incorporation of behavior change into national biodiversity policy. A total of 1306 policy a...

Nature provides a myriad of intangible and non-material services to people. However, urbanites are increasingly disconnected from the natural world. The consequences of this progressive disconnection from nature remain difficult to measure as this process is slow and long-term monitoring or large-scale manipulation on nature experiences are scarce....

Enhancing urban biodiversity is increasingly advanced as a nature-based solution that can help align public health and biodiversity conservation agendas. Yet, research on the relationship between biodiversity and psychological well-being provides inconsistent results. The goal of this interdisciplinary research was to understand how components of p...

Biodiversity conservation is increasingly recognized as a main challenge for the sustainability agenda. With humans are at the epicentre of the biodiversity crisis, conserving nature requires changes in individual behaviour. This study reveals gaps regarding the incorporation of behaviour change into national biodiversity policy. A total of 1306 po...

Nature provides a myriad of intangible and non-material services to people. However, urbanites are increasingly disconnected from the natural world. The consequences of this progressive disconnection from nature remain difficult to measure as this process is slow and long-term monitoring or large-scale manipulation on nature experiences are scarce....

Urbanization and urban lifestyles increasingly disconnect people from nature in a process that was termed the ‘extinction of experience’. This loss of human–nature interactions can undermine both cognitive (ecological knowledge) and affective (emotional connection to nature) relations to nature, further impacting capabilities to experience, care fo...

Protected areas (PAs) are key conservation areas designed to limit the impacts of human activities on biodiversity. PAs also provide great opportunities for individuals to experience nature complexity, through recreational activities, and can contribute to restore the non-material and intangible services nature provides to people (i.e., cultural ec...

The increasing alienation of people from nature is profoundly concerning because people's interactions with nature affect well‐being, affinity for nature, and support of biodiversity conservation. Efforts to restore or enhance people's interactions with nature are, therefore, important to ensure sustainable human and wildlife communities, but littl...

Solutions for conserving biodiversity lie in changing people's behavior. Ambitious international and national conservation policies frequently fail to effectively mitigate biodiversity loss because they rarely apply behavior‐change theories. We conducted a gap analysis of conservation behavior‐change interventions advocated in national conservation...

Urbanization and urban lifestyle are progressively diminishing individuals' opportunity (e.g., nature exposure) to experience and orientation (affinity) towards nature, ultimately reducing people's experiences of nature. This process has been described as the 'extinction of experience' (EoE), and it was suggested that it can alter the way people be...

In two studies, the role of nature experiences and social norms during childhood is explored next to adulthood biospheric values, connectedness to nature, environmental identity, and objective knowledge in relation to pro-environmental behaviors. Study 1 (N = 185) tested the hypothesized model in the realm of general pro-environmental behaviors and...

Species are declining worldwide, but while some are becoming threatened, few others thrive under novel environmental conditions. Land use changes and biological invasion are the main drivers of this ‘biotic homogenization’ (BH) that increasingly occurs in human-dominated landscapes. Among birds, several groups of species have been identified as ‘wi...

Urbanization deletes and degrades natural ecosystems, threatens biodiversity, and alienates people from the experience of nature. Nature-based solutions (NbS) that are inspired and supported by nature have the potential to deliver multifunctional environmental and social benefits to address these challenges in urban areas under context-specific con...

Urbanization threatens biodiversity and people’s opportunities to interact with nature. This progressive dis-connection from the natural world is profoundly concerning as it affects human health, wellbeing, attitudes and behaviors towards nature. Increasing the quantity of experiences of nature (EoN) can enhance health and wellbeing benefits, but i...

Biodiversity is undergoing a major crisis. Institutions, while launching initiatives tackling the issue, are using and diffusing the term biodiversity and related expert knowledge. However, to collectively address the biodiversity crisis, it is important that actors are able to communicate with each other. This is particularly true in the three-par...

Biodiversity is undergoing a major crisis. Institutions, while launching initiatives tackling the issue, are using and diffusing the term biodiversity and related expert knowledge. However, to collectively address the biodiversity crisis, it is important that actors are able to communicate with each other. This is particularly true in the three-par...

The increasing levels of stress entailed by contemporary urban lifestyles can lead to a greater desire to escape from cities. The restorative sense of ‘being away’ produced by natural environments has been substantially explored in greenspaces but little studied in zoos, which endeavour to immerse visitors in a local or exotic environment through b...

Much research has explored the effects of being in natural areas on human health, well-being and environmental concern. However, the combined effects of urbanization, biodiversity loss and the Western way of life reduce the opportunities to experience nature. Landscape management could play a prominent role in providing opportunities and motivation...

Despite decades of awareness about the biodiversity crisis, it remains a wicked problem. Besides preservation and restoration strategies, one approach has focused on increasing public concern about biodiversity issues by emphasizing opportunities for people to experience natural environments. In this essay, we endeavor to complicate the understandi...

With the on-going biodiversity crisis, growing urban lifestyles decrease opportunities to experience nature. However, an intimate relationship with nature has various benefits, for individual well-being, health or attention restoration, but also for environmental issues. Much research effort explored the extent to which people feel being part of th...

Within affluent societies, people who grow up in deprived areas begin reproduction much earlier than their affluent peers, and they display a number of other behaviors adapted to an environment in which life will be short. The psychological mechanisms regulating life-history strategies may be sensitive to the age profile of the people encountered d...

Additional background, methods and analyses. (PDF)

Ancillary self-report study. (PDF)

Human cooperative behaviour, as assayed by decisions in experimental economic dilemmas such as the Dictator Game, is variable across human populations. Within-population variation has been less well studied, especially within industrial societies. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which community-level variation in Dictator Game behavio...