  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 psychological
well-being of green space users relate to species richness and abundance.
Additionally, we investigated how key characteristics that shape the way people
interact with nature, affinity towards nature and ecological knowledge,
moderate the well-being biodiversity relationship. We sampled bird, butterfly
and plant in 24 urban gardens in Israel and distributed 600 close-ended
questionnaires in-situ to measure psychological well-being, nature-relatedness,
ecological knowledge, perceived species richness and demographics. Components
of psychological well-being were mostly associated with perceived species
richness and to lesser extent with actual species richness and abundance for
all taxa. Nature-relatedness moderated these relationships. Respondents with
high nature-relatedness demonstrated positive well-being-richness
relationships, while those with intermediate, or low, nature-relatedness showed
no, or even negative relationships, respectively. Opposite relationships were
recorded for bird abundance, i.e., negative versus positive
well-being-abundance relationship for individuals with high or low
nature-relatedness, respectively. Overall, individuals demonstrated poor
ecological knowledge of species and this variable moderated the relationships
between well-being components and perceived butterfly richness and bird
abundance. Our results demonstrate that one-size-does-not-fit-all when
considering the relationship between psychological well-being and biodiversity
and that affinity to nature is a key moderator for this relationship.
