Differentiated impacts of landscape-level environmental contexts on residents’ environmental perceptions of China’s drylands under ecological restoration

Context Local residents’ environmental perceptions (EPs) of changes in environmental contexts are important for assessing ecological restoration programs and sustainable environmental management. Cross-scale research is necessary to understand the law of universality in ecological restoration. However, most studies have failed to analyse the indirect effects of environmental contexts on local residents’ EPs at the landscape level and have lacked cross-scale analysis of regional differences. Objectives: The goal is to determine the regional heterogeneity of the direct and indirect impacts of landscape-level environmental contexts and individual-level characteristics on rural residents’ EPs. Methods: We conducted a transect survey that included the eastern, middle, and western regions in China’s drylands, which have experienced ecological restoration. Multilevel linear models (MLMs) were applied to analyze the direct and indirect key driving factors at the individual level and the landscape level on rural residents’ EPs. Results: Changes in the landscape-level environmental context can have indirect effects on both single EPs (i.e., perceptions of vegetation, humidity, sandy weather, soil quality, summer temperature, and precipitation) and composite EPs. The EPs are influenced by different landscape-level variables among the east, middle and west of China's drylands. For instances, humidity perception was influenced by precipitation only in the high aridity of western and middle regions; composite EPs were most indirectly impacted by vegetation. Conclusions: These findings have important implications for understanding how landscape-level environmental contexts affect EPs; and they can inform differentiated assessments of ecological restoration programs in China’s drylands.