Perception and Practice Diverge in Bariloche’s Urban Forest Wildlife Study

Residents of Bariloche, the largest city in Argentine Andean Patagonia, can name the region’s most charismatic animals far more readily than its small, common ones, yet that knowledge does not translate into wildlife-friendly behavior, according to a new socioecological study published in Ecological Processes. Researchers led by M. Lucía Bocelli and Valeria S. Ojeda surveyed 95 households in person between February 2024 and September 2025, testing how well people recognized local species, what they understood about habitat needs, and how their everyday backyard practices squared with the threats they said wildlife faces.

Participants were shown photographs and, for birds, played audio recordings of 20 focal species spanning mammals, birds, an amphibian, and a reptile, including the monito del monte (Dromiciops gliroides), the kodkod cat (Leopardus guigna), the Magellanic woodpecker (Campephilus magellanicus), and the Chilean slender snake. Respondents scored from zero for no recognition to two for naming a species correctly, with totals standardized across the set. The team then compared what residents claimed to see or hear with hard ecological evidence: 13 autonomous acoustic recorders deployed across surveyed neighborhoods, opportunistic field observations, and an ongoing citizen science project collecting photographic reports.

The recognition results revealed a striking bias. Culpeo fox and Magellanic woodpecker topped the list, each exceeding 70 percent recognition by name and 95 percent by sight. At the other extreme, small and widespread species fared poorly: fewer than half of respondents reported seeing or hearing the Thorn-tailed Rayadito or Des Murs’s Wiretail, and fewer than one in five could name them. Mammals overall showed the highest recognition despite being elusive and often nocturnal, while bats and frogs were frequently reported in generic terms, with only a minority distinguishing the Cinnamon Red Bat or the Chilean Four-eyed Frog by name.

The comparison with ecological records sharpened the picture. Most focal species had detection rates below 50 percent among residents even though the animals were confirmed present in their neighborhoods. The Chucao Tapaculo was detected by 80 percent of relevant respondents and the Magellanic woodpecker by 67.6 percent, but the Thorn-tailed Rayadito, confirmed in every one of the 13 surveyed neighborhoods, was correctly detected by only 32.6 percent. Common Barn-owls and Austral Pygmy-owls, present in more than 80 percent of sampled neighborhoods, were detected by roughly a third of residents. Some detections of rare species such as the monito del monte and kodkod referred to sightings made more than a decade earlier.

Knowledge tracked exposure, but only up to a point. In a linear model, the ecological knowledge index rose with years lived in the city and with neighborhood species richness, and male respondents scored higher than female respondents; together these variables explained a moderate share of the variation (adjusted R² = 0.33). The authors interpret longer exposure to native forest remnants as an effective informal school for learning local biodiversity, consistent with their hypothesis that direct experience builds ecological literacy.

Habitat knowledge, however, lagged badly. Roughly half of respondents reported knowing nothing about where owls or woodpeckers nest, and among those who answered, only about half correctly identified trees or hollow trunks. Feeding knowledge was similarly patchy: rodents dominated guesses about owl diets at 81 percent, arthropods led for woodpeckers at 82 percent, and sizable minorities admitted no knowledge or chose incorrect options. Notably, respondents born in the city were more likely to identify cavity-nesting sites correctly, suggesting place-based familiarity with local forest structure, while younger respondents under 30 showed lower feeding knowledge, a generational gap the authors link to declining direct contact with nature.

The study’s central tension emerges in the practices data. Fully 95 percent of in-person respondents said wildlife in Bariloche’s neighborhoods faces threats, and 92 percent of those identified habitat loss as the leading danger, followed by predation by dogs and cats at 48 percent. Yet 72 percent of respondents had removed trees from their own property, and tree removal showed no association with selecting habitat loss as a threat. Pet ownership was likewise unlinked to choosing pet predation as a threat, even though 73 percent of households kept cats or dogs and most of those animals had outdoor access, with 42 percent of dogs ranging freely onto streets.

Rodenticide use produced the most paradoxical finding. Respondents who correctly identified rodents as owl prey were actually more likely to report using or having used toxic baits, a penalized logistic regression showed, and 21 percent of in-person respondents overall reported bait use. The authors suggest this reflects poor public understanding of secondary poisoning, in which anticoagulant rodenticides kill owls and other non-target predators, combined with culturally normalized rodent control driven partly by fear of hantavirus, a disease transmitted by native rodents in the region. They argue that information campaigns alone rarely change entrenched habits and point to jurisdictions such as California and several European countries, which have restricted second-generation anticoagulants alongside integrated pest management, as models for structural policy responses.

The second major contribution concerns survey methodology. Alongside the in-person interviews, the team collected 221 online surveys in the same neighborhoods through snowball sampling and leaflets. The online respondents were significantly more likely to be women and to hold university or postgraduate degrees, and their responses differed in substance: only 10 percent reported toxic bait use compared with 21 percent in person, habitat loss was chosen as the top threat less often, and vehicle collisions ranked higher. Had the researchers relied exclusively on online data, they conclude, they would have drawn a skewed picture of local practices and perceptions, potentially misinforming management decisions about the social drivers of biodiversity change.

Bariloche offers an unusually instructive setting for these questions. The city sits within a matrix of native temperate forest dominated by Nothofagus and Austrocedrus chilensis, borders Nahuel Huapi National Park, and retains roughly 5600 hectares of forest vegetation within its municipal jurisdiction, though urban expansion and exotic tree invasions continue to fragment it. The region’s forests support an exceptional proportion of cavity-dependent birds, making large decaying trees critical structural resources. The authors argue that their findings, from charismatic-species bias reinforced by a century of national park education narratives to the mismatch between stated threats and household behavior, make the case for explicitly integrating socioecological evidence into urban biodiversity governance across the rapidly growing cities of South America.

Subject of Research: Residents' knowledge, perceptions, and practices regarding urban forest wildlife in Bariloche, Patagonia

Article Title: When perception and practice diverge: a socioecological study of urban forest wildlife in Patagonia

Article References: Bocelli, M. L., Ojeda, V. S., & Suarez, M. L. (2026). When perception and practice diverge: a socioecological study of urban forest wildlife in Patagonia. Ecological Processes, 15(1), Article 87. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13717-026-00736-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13717-026-00736-y

Keywords: urban wildlife, human-wildlife interactions, Patagonia, Bariloche, ecological knowledge, survey bias, rodenticides, habitat loss, peridomestic practices, socioecology, conservation, native forest