Investigating plant awareness: Methodologies, challenges and possibilities

Societal Impact Statement Plants are crucial for sustaining life on Earth, and understanding human relationships to plants is key to ensuring that the role of plants is recognized in biology research. This goal cannot be achieved without valid and reliable methods that describe, explain and predict how humans experience plants. Plant awareness is a useful concept that helps researchers understand the individual differences in how people perceive, evaluate and act towards plants. This paper aims to outline the many methodological approaches to researching plant awareness and to critically assess the role plant awareness plays in biology research. Through our suggested guidelines for further methodology development, we hope to strengthen the validity and reliability, and hence the applicability, of scientific work into everyday sustainability and teaching practices. Summary Understanding the relationships between plants and people is crucial because plants sustain life on earth. Plant awareness is one of the key concepts available that help us describe and understand this relationship. Having a strong and clear methodological framework for studying this phenomenon is a necessary condition for building the bridge between the theoretical concept and its application in educational and conservation contexts. Here, we explore and systematize methodologies applied in empirical research concerning the concepts of ‘plant blindness’, ‘plant awareness’ and ‘plant awareness disparity’. We examine 46 unique theoretical and empirical contributions. We discuss the availability and usefulness of existing methodological approaches, applied research designs and measurement tools used as indicators. We present suggestions for their development, and how new research designs could contribute to extant research on plant awareness and related concepts. We found that both qualitative and quantitative research approaches have been successfully applied in the field, and various indicators were used to measure plant awareness. We offer directions for further methodological development, in choice of research design and measurement tools choices.