Botanic gardens shelter life and hope in this time of mass extinction. They
support biopsychosocial aspects of resilience by providing urban populations
with needed opportunities for stress relief, psychological restoration, and
social contact; and contribute to socioecological resilience through learning,
motivating and connecting processes. As cities grow and visitation patterns
shift, however, many botanic gardens themselves face adaptation pressures.
The behavioral sciences offer theory and methods by which botanic gardens
and their host communities may better understand who visits, why, what they
experience, and how their visits affect them. This presentation describes how a behavioral research program was
established in the Linnaean Gardens of Uppsala (Sweden) and gives several
examples of completed and ongoing studies. It aims to inspire development of
more impactful research about how botanic gardens can harness their role as
modern, urban resilience hubs, and to give an impetus for exchange between
researchers and gardens that seek to implement such programs. The Linnaean Collaboration has so far generated over 40 advanced-level
student theses, many of them contributing to one of six overarching themes
and associated research designs. The themes include coherent lines of study
that use the gardens as a field laboratory for examining broadly relevant
aspects of human-nature relations; that build on particular amenities in the
garden to promote learning and therapeutic processes; and that map
naturalistic patterns of visitor behavior and experience in relation to specific
environmental features. Collating data within themes, we have collaborated
with the involved students in publishing seven peer-reviewed articles, given
numerous conference presentations, and secured major grant funding for
extended research efforts.These examples and the simple yet effective and sustainable operations of the
Linnaean Collaboration can guide similar endeavors elsewhere and spark
global collaboration for behavioral research in botanic gardens.