Cultural and recreational values of biodiversity are key components of nature's contributions to people, with aesthetics playing a major role as a simple form of emotional response.
Using an online survey, we disentangled the effects of different facets of biodiversity on aesthetic preferences for coral reef fish assemblages. We found a positive but saturating effect of species richness on human preference, a negative effect of species abundance, no effect of functional diversity, and contrasting effects of species composition depending on species attractiveness.
These results show that the relationship between biodiversity and human interest is more complex than previously thought, and by integrating multiple levels of organization, our study improves the evaluation of biodiversity's aesthetic value.
