Geo-questionnaire survey on geodiversity assessment of selected national parks

Dear Colleagues,

We are kindly requesting your help with the assessment of geodiversity in three (or one of three) national parks in Poland including Karkonosze National Park (KPN) in mountains area, Roztocze National Park (RNP) in uplands, and Wolin National Park (WNP) in lowland, seaside area. To facilitate your input, we have developed a geo-questionnaire - an online data collection tool that combines a questionnaire with a map.

The geo-questionnaire has two parts. In the first part, we ask you to rate on a five-point Likert scale the importance of selected geographical factors on geodiversity in a national park (1 represents very low geodiversity and 5 – very high geodiversity). We also request to include a brief justification for you selection (optional). In the second part, following the rating of factors, we ask you to weight the relative importance of each factor with respect to other factors by assigning it a value expressed in per cent. The sum of factor weights should sum up to 100%.

Your responses to the geo-questionnaire will be essential for the study of uncertainty and criteria sensitivity affecting the quantitative assessments of geodiversity for the selected national parks. The anonymized data collected through the geo-questionnaire will help us to develop a generic method of accounting for the inherent bias in rates and weights of geodiversity factors, and ultimately contribute a more reliable assessment of geodiversity.

The reason we ask for your contact information on the first page of geo-questionnaire is solely for the purpose of allowing us to contact you in case we need a clarification of your response.

Please do not hesitate to email us if you have any questions in this regard.

Explanation

Assessments typically involve an element of subjectivity. We are confronted with it whenever we make a judgement involving an interpretation of data. In science, even though we strive for objectivity, our judgements are biased by many confounding factors including the variability in subject matter knowledge, experience, and expertise. Assessment of geodiversity, which can be either overrated or underrated belongs in this category.

Geodiversity is a complex system of Earth’s surface composed by such components as geological structures, landforms, soils, climate, surface and ground water taking into account human impact. Hence, the geodiversity assessment of any area involves assigning a rating score and a weight for each environmental component. A Likert 1-5 scale rating value that is assigned to each factor, expresses the contribution of a given factor to geodiversity of defined area, where:

1 - - very low geodiversity,
2 - - low (below medium) geodiversity,
3 - - medium (moderate) geodiversity,
4 - - high (above medium) geodiversity,
5 - - very high geodiversity.

This procedure entails at least two sources of errors in geodiversity assessment:

1. a) the uncertainty of rating scores assigned to geodiversity factors, which depends on knowledge, experience, skill, attitude and other personal traits of respondent, and 

2. b) the uncertainty of weights assigned to selected environmental components of global geodiversity assessment in a spatial multi-criteria model which depends on data, criteria and their parameters etc. 

Poznań/San Diego, 1^st August 2020

NOTE: Geodiversity analyzes were made based on spatial and non-spatial data obtained from national parks.