Visitors’ Perception of Urban Nature Reserves in Poland
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper is interesting and significant in urban planning and green infrastructure management.
The aim of the study is not clear and it should not be just to present the results of a survey. It should be stated the purpose of the survey. What was the research question and hypothesis for creating the survey? What was the gap in research that this survey contributed? What could be the practical implications to urban planning?
Also it is not clear what the definition of nature reserve in Poland is. What are the permitted uses? Reading this paper give the perception that it is equal to urban national park. The definition of nature reserve varies from country to country and it is not clear internationally. The introduction of this paper should show this difficulty and complexity and contribute to clarify the topic of urban nature reserves. Nature reserves fall into different IUCN categories depending on the level of protection afforded by local laws. Normally it is more strictly protected than a nature park but this depends on the country. Also it is necessary to clarify the difference of urban nature reserve and urban national forest park. Why they are so important and why some reserves and national urban parks exist inside urban or peri-urban space (see the paper: Planning for environmental justice in an urban national park. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 52, 365–392, or the paper: Weekend visitors' views and perceptions at an urban national forest park of Cyprus during summertime. Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism, 17, 112-121, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jort.2016.10.002).
The Method chapter should have in the beginning and before to describe the survey one subchapter that describes the case study: urban nature reserves of Poland. Now this information is spread in Introduction and in Methods and the legislation part was clarified in Discussion and in summary of conclusions.
The methodology may lead to biased results and this should be mentioned in discussion and conclusions. The snowball sampling technique and the emails were focusing in specific groups of people that have special interests and hobbies related to nature or people enjoying nature in general and also Internet forums devoted to nature activities and stakeholders related to nature. Meanwhile there might be a big part of population that are not related to nature but have opinion about it and they are not included.
Taking into consideration that the survey focus on people related to nature activities (reserve direct users), the result gave preference for recreation. Taking into consideration that the survey excluded all people that never visit a nature reserve (indirect users), practically excluded all that respect the function of protection and they give high importance in natural values of those reserves.
In the first paragraph of discussion it is mentioned that the study confirm that the visitors consider UNR as recreational areas, meanwhile in Table 6 the 66% visit them for “Relaxation/mental restoration”, and in Table 9 the most observed activities were Social meetings and education. Thus, the results of this study show that majority of visitors see UNR as contact with nature, socialization opportunity and education area and not a first as recreation area. Much of the other reasons to visit UNR like walking may be related to need with contact with nature, otherwise the city dwellers could walk in city centre or in shopping. Cycling could be inside a gym. Thus, I recommend that the authors interpret the outputs of the survey as a proof that city dwellers need contact with nature reserve and this is in agreement to the biophilia theory. The results in Table 2 confirm this but also show a possible lack of awareness on the importance of those places to sustainability. Even if they recognise the multifunctionalily of those places as it was presented in the question of Table 2 it was formulated in a tricky way (What aspects – beside nature values) that was not clear.
About the limitations of the study it is mentioned that number of <18 was low but usually we don’t make surveys to children without authorization from parents. Moreover the children are advised to not provide online information about their habits.
In general the paper provide useful information about the perception of urban nature reserve visitors in Poland, which is a peculiar situation and interesting also to the international audience. This paper characterize city dwellers’ perceptions and actual use of UNRs in Poland. Meanwhile the benefits from UNR are for all city dwellers and not only for visitors and this is the main limitation of this study about UNR.
Thus I propose to add the word visitors in the title. For example: Visitors' perception of urban nature reserves in Poland.
Also I propose to delete the second part of the title “are they places for recreation or experiencing nature?”, because for most visitors is both.
Finally I propose to reformulate the following phrase in the Abstract because it was not a clear interpretation from the survey “Only around 5% of the respondents were interested in experiencing nature exclusively.” According to Table 2 city dwellers’ views was that besides experiencing nature the UNRs are perceived as multifunctional places that deliver multiple services and benefits.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 1
We would like to thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. Below, we tried to inform you on how we responded to them.
1. We clarified the aim of the study: we changed and expanded it and, as it was also suggested by the Reviewer 2, we “sharpened” the reason of the survey.
2. The definition of nature reserves in Poland was added and it was presented on the background of the IUCN categories. We hope that this explanation will clarify the situation of the nature reserves located in Polish cities.
3. In the methodology a subchapter describing the surveyed nature reserves in Polish cities was added.
4. As we were preparing the survey, we assumed that people who have never visited urban nature reserve would not be concerned with presenting opinions about them. Moreover, we focused on actual use of these areas, so visitors of UNRs were the most important source of information. At the moment it is too late to take your point of view into consideration as the survey was finished and the data were collected. That is why, we decided to mention this as one of the limitations of our survey. We also changed, according to your suggestion, the title of the article in order to be precise about the target group of our survey. A participation in the survey was possible also for people with other than nature related interests – we spread the information about the survey on social media (Facebook).
5. We modified conclusions to indicate that urban nature reserves, according to the results, are multifunctional areas, providing city dwellers with nature, leisure, recreational and educational values.
6. You are right about the respondents under 18 years old. We removed the data obtained from this youngest age category from the results.
7. The abstract was amended.
Reviewer 2 Report
See my review in a separated file.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 2
We would like to thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. Below, we tried to inform you on how we responded to them.
1. We have tried to “sharpen” the reason of the survey” as you suggested. In fact, we hope that results of our survey would be a sort of support to the idea of URBAN NATURE RESERVES - a new category of a nature conservation area that does not exist in Poland at the moment, and that should allow to manage successfully conservation needs with social (mostly recreational) functions of the area. This should be visible in the rewritten aim of the survey and in the conclusions.
2. While discussing about “explanatory variables” we assumed that visitors’ perception would depend mostly on the visitors’ age (younger would be more interested in using nature reserves for recreation purposes) and the size of the city (visitors in bigger cities would be more frequent users of nature reserves in order to be in contact with nature). As it was suggested by the Reviewer 1 – we removed the data received from the youngest age category (<18 years old). We did not collect information about occupation and income (these are not welcomed questions in Polish reality). However, we were able to check education as a variable. We added this information to the paper, completed the results and presented some correlations related to this variable.
3. Nature reserves in Poland are set up – first of all – to protect nature values. However, other reasons (e.g. protection of cultural or historical values) are sometimes mentioned in the regional ordinances issued by the Regional Directorates for Environmental Protection while an individual nature reserve is being established. By formulating the question (table 2) in such a way we wanted to study to what extent values other than nature are important for UNRs visitors.
4. Line 275-276 – we added these percentages to the table 6. Since we removed the youngest age category it is now 2.1% instead of 2.9%. It means that 2.1% of the respondents selected the answer “enjoying nature/ leisure in a natural surrounding” as the only one, so it was the only reason for which they visit UNRs.
5. Line 278 – we interpreted walking rather as leisure than recreational activity. Such an approach helped us also to examine to what extent UNRs are used for sport activities.
6. Line 286 – the respondents could choose an answer “as a shortcut to get to another place” (7.8% of the surveyed people indicated this answer – it was 8.3% before, including also the youngest category). We removed the phrase “crossing area” that could be misleading.
7. In the discussion and conclusion we decided to develop the idea of URBAN NATURE RESERVES mentioned in the aim of the survey. We hope that it will be an answer to your questions which you presented in closing part of your review.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The revised version was significantly improved and I do recommend the manuscript for publication.
Some more discussion of the results with international comparison will make the paper more interesting. Another interesting aspect of this research could arise if there is data comparing visitors that were residents of the urban area of the particular urban nature reserve, with visitors as tourists from other cities. As I understood the survey was conducted in Polish language and excluded the opinion of any foreign tourist visitor, thus this should be mentioned in conclusions as limitation that will be answered with future research as was already identified by the authors. Meanwhile, since the paper had an extensive review, it might need a moderate English language and style improvement.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 1
Again, we would like to thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. We have tried to develop the discussion and discuss findings of our survey in relation to the results of other studies.
Unfortunately, we are not able to divide our respondents into group of tourists and group of city residents. We didn’t collect such data. So, we mentioned this problem in “discussion chapter” as well as lack of information about foreign tourists.
Reviewer 2 Report
This draft is much better than before. It is clear now the main idea that want to be discussed in the paper. Still, there some points that should be noticed for further improvement.
1. The notification about significance of Pearson correlation in Table 2, 4, 5, and 6 are not match with the P-value in the table. These should be corrected.
2. Regarding background factors, the reason why you used age, city size, and education of participants as relevant variables should be explained in the text as you have responded my question in the previous review.
3. In the discussion section, the discussion about the effect of age, city size, and education of participants on visitors’ perception is still absent. I think you need to explain about this as you have interesting findings related to the results of Pearson correlation analysis. This alos important for managing UNR in the future.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 2
Again, we would like to thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.
1. We corrected data presenting Pearson correlations and P-values in the Tables. Previously, it could be a bit misleading that we marked (in bold) only some correlations (above >0.100). To avoid any difficulties by interpretations of the results we completed the Tables with all the obtained data and indicated (in bold) all the correlations for which P-values are statistically significant (<0.05).
2. We explained the reason of using age, city size and education of participants as relevant variables in the Materials and methods chapter.
3. As you suggested, we add the discussion about the effect of age, city size and education of participants on visitors’ perception and use of UNRs.
