Multifaceted landscapes for grassland restoration: exploring individual perceptions on grasslands through photovoice

Reconnecting humans and nature, along with reversing the trend of biodiversity loss, are among the most pressing challenges of our times. Grassland restoration offers a promising pathway to halt and reverse biodiversity decline. Since local people are central to maintaining biodiversity and equally benefit from nature, transdisciplinary and social-ecological approaches to restoration are key to achieving sustainable outcomes. These approaches go beyond ecological targets by engaging local actors as stewards of restoration efforts. Understanding how people relate to grasslands is pivotal for this purpose, since these relationships are strongly shaped by individual perceptions. We therefore elicited local actor’s perceptions of grassland biodiversity and their human-nature relationships within a transdisciplinary real-world laboratory for grassland restoration in central Germany. To capture these perceptions and actively involve local actors in the transdisciplinary process, we applied the photovoice method (n = 15). Our analysis revealed three multifaceted narratives depicting the importance of landscape heterogeneity for local actors. We further disentangled the intricacies between human intervention and natural dynamics, as well as an ambiguous awareness of the current state of grassland biodiversity. Finally, we discuss how these narratives from the real-world laboratory can inform strategies to cultivate local stewardship and shape social-ecological restoration interventions at the landscape level to nurture human-nature relationships.