Investigating plant awareness: Image composition affects student perceptions of flora and fauna

Summary Societal Impact Statement Plant awareness disparity (plant blindness) refers to the tendency of people to overlook plants in the environment and underestimate their importance to ecosystems and human life. This phenomenon is particularly evident in educational contexts, where students often display limited knowledge and interest in plants compared to animals. Fostering plant awareness is a crucial goal not only in biology education to help people recognize the vital role plants play in ecosystems, but also to inspire them to engage with plant life—whether by conducting research, working with plants in agriculture and food production, or contributing to conservation efforts. Summary Our research investigates the relationship between plant awareness and image composition among secondary school students, focusing on how the positioning of plants and animals within landscape photographs affects students' perception of them. We conducted a study involving 250 ninth‐grade students from two schools in Germany. The students were presented with two landscape photographs showing a plant and an animal (mammal). We varied the positions of the plant and the animal between the foreground and the middle ground to see whether their position has an influence on their perception. Students provided written descriptions which were analysed separately for both identification and quality of description of the plant and animal (as well as of living and non‐living nature in the background). Our findings indicate that plants are generally less frequently identified and described in less detail than animals. In contrast to animals (mammals), plants in the foreground are more likely to be identified, whereas those in the middle ground often remain completely unmentioned. Students with a higher interest in plants showed better identification and description of them, a trend also observed with animals. Female students provided more detailed descriptions of animals and living nature in general, but not of plants specifically. Our experimental approach enables an evidence‐based analysis of plant perception, derived from student descriptions of landscape photographs with variably positioned plants and animals. Our findings suggest that plants should be positioned more prominently in images to enhance their visibility and improve plant awareness in educational contexts. Moreover, the type of images we used could also be utilized in targeted educational strategies to increase the students' sensitivity to plants and the environment.