Ranchers, agricultural producers, and non-industrial private forest landowners’ habitat conservation behavior and participation in voluntary incentive programs has been well studied across the United States. While very... [ view full abstract ]
Ranchers, agricultural producers, and non-industrial private forest landowners’ habitat conservation behavior and participation in voluntary incentive programs has been well studied across the United States. While very applicable, the insights from this research are not well known by the legions of conservation practitioners who work on private lands. We will distill five key highlights from the literature that are relevant to practitioners and human dimensions researchers alike, drawing on existing meta-analyses, our own literature review, and our landowner research.
First, we will address what drives landowner conservation behavior. Based on our review of the literature, the typical predictors of landowner conservation behavior include land characteristics, landowner characteristics, psychological characteristics, and conservation program/practice characteristics. Our literature review shows some commonalities and inconsistencies from research on different conservation behaviors and in different management contexts. Second, we will highlight some variables (e.g., lifestyle centrality, sense of place) that explain rancher behavior more specifically. Third, we will briefly review the extensive literature on landowner typologies and address how this mechanism for understanding different types of landowners is relevant to practitioners. Fourth, we will also introduce a framework we developed for conceptualizing the phases of landowner conservation, from practice adoption (with or without conservation incentive programs) to retention to persistence. In doing so, we will illuminate a gap in the literature concerning private land management when conservation incentive payments stop. We will share our analysis of the literature on this topic and our hypotheses about the practice and landowner characteristics that contribute to conservation behavior persistence. Finally, we will end with some thoughts on important policy and programmatic applications of the current body of landowner research and the greatest future research needs.
