Nature-related education and serious gaming to improve young citizens’ awareness about ecosystem services provided by urban trees

A widespread challenge of international urban policies is to achieve nature-rich cities. To achieve this aim, scholars and urban planners are developing innovative methods for considering the heterogeneity and geo-specificity of the composition of green infrastructures and their related services in the design of the urban green system. Particularly in urban contexts with a high-density population, urban policies need the engagement of conscious communities to become effective; thence, public administrations need innovative, tailored educational methods to improve inhabitants’ awareness. To help the municipalities achieve this goal, we developed a serious game called ESS-Hunt. The paper evaluates the game’s educational effectiveness and the suitability of municipal tree cadastre data as its source of information. The game was developed on the Google Maps platform and was played in an urban park of an Italian city (Perugia) involving 135 children aged 10–14. The participants answered the same questionnaire before and after the game to evaluate the learning process, and the paired t-test showed learning progress for all the statements with statistical significance (30 %, p. value < 0.05). Regarding urban policies to improve citizens’ awareness about the role of the urban green systems in their well-being, our results highlight as overall principles (i) the suitability of municipal tree cadastre as a source of data to develop educational content, (ii) the effectiveness of serious games in the development of tailored, innovative learning solutions, (iii) and the need to develop differentiated and complementary educational methods to respond to the heterogeneity of local communities learning processes.