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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2016

• Title: Understanding forest landowner attitudes and behaviors
• Primary Author: Emily Huff (Forest Service)
• Additional Authors: Brett Butler (USDA Forest Service); David Kittredge (University of Massachusetts - Amherst )
• Abstract:

  Current Projects:
  
  
  
  1. Typical studies of private woodland owner behavior involve self-reported surveys where people are asked to recall past behavior or predict future behavior. These surveys are prone to bias, as it can be difficult to remember when things occur or to accurately predict what one will do in the future. We are testing a new method of understanding landowner behavior by asking them to respond in a given moment whether they have thought about their forestland the previous day. We will contact landowners (using electronic means) once weekly for one to two months to “ping” them and ask a question about their land and their thoughts about it. This method will be tested in the winter and summer of 2016.
  
  
  
  2. State and federal agencies have strong interest in applying adaptation and mitigation principles to their large-scale management to better accommodate the circumstances anticipated by climate change. These large agency ownerships do not exist in isolation, and are often embedded in landscapes dominated by smaller family owners. Effective adaptation and mitigation strategies will be ones that span individual ownerships and are relevant at landscape scales. Thus, it is imperative to understand family forest owner attitudes specifically towards climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies undertaken by agencies, and assess the extent to which they would engage in similar approaches to more truly make this an ecosystem-scale response. We will explore these family forest owner attitudes by gathering spatial data on private woodland ownership near public and state forest land and conducting semi-structured interviews with landowners in these areas.
  
  
  
  Proposed Future Projects:
  
  
  
  1. The USDA Forest Service has long-term ecological data (Forest Inventory and Analysis [FIA] program) and now has repeated measurements of social data on forest owners (National Woodland Owner Survey [NWOS]). We propose to combine this data using longitudinal analyses to investigate the relationships between social variables and ecological outcomes. Some behaviors we can investigate include selling timber, selling and subdividing forest land, and protecting forest land. We would also like to look more closely at one or two watersheds in Massachusetts to establish a long-term panel of forested parcels to on which to track ecological and social variables, intensifying the data collected by the FIA and NWOS programs.
  
  
  
  2. We propose a coupled-human and natural systems project that combines the LANDIS-II modeling environment with an agent-based modeling environment to better understand land use change. Forest landowners will be sorted into typologies that can be used to model patterns of harvesting and land use conversion in LANDIS-II.
  
  

• Research Category: Conservation and Management