Private land conservation decision-making: An integrative social science model

Wildfire impacts and mitigation strategies among California cannabis producers

California has experienced increasing frequency and intensity of wildfire, with the five largest fires on record since 2018. Over the same period, licensed cannabis production has grown to a high-grossing industry, while remaining an important source of rural livelihood. Importantly, the geography of cannabis production overlaps with high fire hazard areas more than any other crop in the state. We developed and deployed a state-wide survey of licensed outdoor producers to determine direct and indirect impacts of wildfire, as well as how producers have responded to these threats. Quantitative and narrative data were subjected to statistical and thematic analyses, demonstrating key findings around fire-related losses, mitigation tools and techniques, and perceptions of risk. Producers experienced a range of impacts beyond direct burning, including reduced light (affecting grow rates), ash deposition (with impacts on product quality and saleability), and production disruptions. Producer responses to the threat of fire and smoke varied, in part affected by the costs of mitigation, yet some common strategies emerged. However, while most growers reported impacts from fire, these were often outweighed by concerns over other pressures on production and profitability. Our hope is that these findings around the experiences and concerns of California's cannabis producers will inform future research directions and provide the first steps toward policy interventions to better address the challenges of living with wildfire.

Landholders' intentions to engage in private land conservation agreements under climate risk

Private landholders play a critical role in global biodiversity conservation as they manage significant portions of land in many countries. Understanding the motivations and barriers related to landholders' uptake of formal conservation agreements, such as conservation covenants, is essential for scaling up and prioritizing investment in biodiversity conservation. However, we currently have a limited understanding of how landholders' experiences and perceptions of past and future threats from extreme weather events relate to intentions to adopt conservation covenants. Knowledge of this is likely to be critical for designing private land conservation programs under climate change. To address this, we applied a protection motivation theory to explore whether the experience of extreme weather events (i.e., drought, bushfire, and flood) and climate change risk perceptions predicted stated intentions to adopt conservation covenants. Using a survey of landholders in New South Wales, Australia (N = 294), multivariate structural equation models were run, each tailored to a specific extreme weather event as well as a model combining all events. We found that landholders' beliefs in the effectiveness of conservation covenants (response efficacy belief) and their perceptions of the severity of future extreme weather events were positively and significantly related to their likelihood to adopt conservation covenants. Moreover, the perceived severity of extreme weather events mediated the effect of the extreme weather event experience and environmental values on landholders' stated adoption intentions. In the event-specific models, flood severity perceptions mediated participants' experience of flood on covenant adoption intentions, while bushfire severity perceptions significantly mediated the impact of environmental values on adoption intentions. Conversely, no mediation effects were observed in the drought model. Financial incentives, past conservation behaviour, conservation or land management network membership, and land characteristics did not significantly predict conservation covenant adoption intentions. Drawing from these findings, integrating landholder perceptions and experiences of extreme weather events into the design of private land conservation policies and programs is likely to improve the long-term resilience of private land conservation initiatives.

Social targeting conservation subsidies in the Western Lake Erie Basin

Achieving public conservation objectives often requires voluntary conservation on private land. However, some landowners are reluctant to participate in voluntary conservation programs, even when offered financial incentives. Heterogeneity in willingness to participate suggests that policymakers can improve conservation outcomes by strategically targeting subsidy program outreach, messaging, and design to landowners who are more likely to enroll, which we call "social targeting." This paper informs social targeting a subsidy to farmers to construct wetlands in the Western Lake Erie Basin in the United States. We use a discrete choice survey and a latent class model to identify preference heterogeneity and farmer attributes associated with willingness to construct wetlands. Willing respondents prefer larger projects, but fully subsidized construction is vital for participation. Simulation results highlight that even the most willing farmers are unlikely to install a wetland if construction is not fully subsidized. Policy practitioners should target outreach to younger farmers and larger farms. Outreach strategies should focus on private benefits from the wetland, such as aesthetic values and hunting opportunities, highlight farmer responsibility for Lake Erie water quality, and promote positive social norms surrounding wetland construction.

Aligning data with decisions to address the biodiversity crisis

The planetary outlook for biodiversity is dire. A new collection of articles discusses the disconnect between the data we have and the data we need for more effective action on conservation, as well as how social justice and end-user viewpoints must be centered to ensure a more sustainable future for our planet.

This land is your land, this could be marsh land: Property parcel characteristics of marsh migration corridors in Rhode Island, USA

Salt marshes, critical habitats offering many ecosystem services, are threatened by development, accelerated sea level rise (SLR) and other anthropogenic stressors that are projected to worsen. As seas rise, some salt marshes can migrate inland if there is adjacent, permeable, undeveloped land available. Facilitating marsh migration is necessary for coastal resilience efforts, but extensive coastal development can make finding suitable migration corridors challenging. This work seeks to characterize changes in land use, ownership, and economic value at the property parcel level within current versus future marsh areas for the state of Rhode Island, USA. We find that most parcels currently containing salt marsh are publicly owned, whereas most adjacent parcels projected to contain new salt marsh in 2050 are privately owned. Additionally, parcels containing new marsh in 2050 have 47% higher per-hectare assessed values than parcels containing current marsh. We describe the locations and characteristics of parcels within migration corridors with the lowest per-hectare values that may be the most cost-effective for marsh conservation practitioners to protect. This study highlights the expanding land use types and landowner sets that will be involved in marsh conservation decisions, and the economic value of potential migration corridors where costly tradeoffs may be necessary to promote coastal resilience.

Factors associated with preemptive conservation under the U.S. Endangered Species Act

In recent decades, there has been an increasing emphasis on proactive efforts to conserve species being considered for listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) before they are listed (i.e., preemptive conservation). These efforts, which depend on voluntary actions by public and private land managers across the species' range, aim to conserve species while avoiding regulatory costs associated with ESA listing. We collected data for a set of social, economic, environmental, and institutional factors that we hypothesized would influence voluntary decisions to promote or inhibit preemptive conservation of species under consideration for ESA listing. We used logistic regression to estimate the association of these factors with preemptive conservation outcomes based on data for a set of species that entered the ESA listing process and were either officially listed (n = 314) or preemptively conserved (n = 73) from 1996 to 2018. Factors significantly associated with precluded listing due to preemptive conservation included high baseline conservation status, low proportion of private land across the species' range, small total range size, exposure to specific types of threats, and species' range extending over several states. These results highlight strategies that can help improve conservation outcomes, such as allocating resources for imperiled species earlier in the listing process, addressing specific threats, and expanding incentives and coordination mechanisms for conservation on private lands.