The overall purpose and contribution of this thesis is increasing the understanding of components of the value of environmental goods. It investigates how the public perceive environmental goods (lay people’s perception) and the elements of it that they value. Providing such knowledge contributes to improving valuation methods, e.g. the use of the Choice Experiment (CE) for valuing forest biodiversity conservation. Increasing knowledge of lay people’s perception and mental constructs of environmental goods can help researchers to know how they can present environmental goods in CEs which align with respondents’ perceptions and to further understand the appropriate way of measuring these values.