Search Results (12)

Land management decisions and conservation value are heavily influenced by land ownership, land cover, and land use. Our research aimed to examine ownership and land cover distribution, classify landowners based on land cover composition, and evaluate the ability of land cover clustering to be predictive of landowner motivations and behaviors in Maryland, USA. We tabulated a high-resolution land cover map against ownership boundaries, applied hierarchical clustering, and identified five landowner types characterized by a dominant land cover: (1) forest, (2) turf grass, (3) developed, (4) hay/pasture, and (5) crops. We analyzed a landowner survey of 3344 respondents to reveal how clusters predicted recreation, conservation, income, and other motivations. We found a skewed ownership distribution: 95.3% of smaller ownerships (<5 acres) cover 27.3% of the land, while 4.7% of larger owners hold 72.7%. Ownership patterns vary by cover, with forests and wetlands showing bimodal distributions, unimodal for cropland and hay/pasture, and turf grass concentrated in smaller properties. Survey analysis showed that crop, hay/pasture, and forest clusters had income percentages increasing with property size, with crop and hay/pasture accelerating more; conservation interest rose with size for forest and crop, but not hay/pasture; hunting motivation was highest in forest but increased with size similarly across clusters; non-hunting recreation motivation was highest in smaller hay/pasture properties, but decreased with size for all. Although each landowner has unique motivations and goals, our results reveal trends mediated by size of property and land cover that can be used to target outreach and improve conservation outcomes across Maryland’s diverse landscape. Full article

Approximately 30% of the private land in Texas, USA is under absentee ownership. Understanding who absentee landowners are and their land management behaviors is vital for the protection of privately owned landscapes and the ecosystem services that they support, including surface water quality. By focusing on absentee landowners with properties in five watersheds in Texas, we utilized the theory of place attachment to gain insights into absentee landowners’ land management decisions and their involvement in water quality conservation programs, such as watershed protection plans (WPPs). By conducting a mail-out survey, we obtained 100 responses, which were analyzed using an exploratory factor analysis and a series of nonparametric assessments. The results revealed that, contrary to the term “absentee”, the landowners in our study demonstrated strong feelings of place attachment and heightened land stewardship. Based on these findings, we suggest that instead of considering absentee landowners as obstacles to collaborative conservation initiatives, such as WPPs, natural resource practitioners should recognize and capitalize on the emotional attachment that these landowners have to their properties, thereby fostering their involvement. By demonstrating the owner–land relationship and its behavioral outcomes among absentee landowners, this study provides a novel contribution to the existing literature on place attachment in the context of private land management and conservation. Full article

Woody biomass is suggested as a substitute for fossil fuels to achieve sustainable development. However, transitioning the land purpose to produce woody biomass entails investment and a tradeoff between wood pellet production and the current utilities created by the land, hindering the willingness of private landowners. To many forest landowners, forest trees and residues considered unprofitable to transport would be left in the forest without other proper use. The wasted woody resources on the land can be a potential source to increase the woody biomass supply. To support the policymakers, logging companies, state agencies, and landowners to better capitalize on these wasted resources, we aimed to identify the characteristics of woody-resource-wasting landowners and examine how to increase their likelihood to contribute to woody-biomass-based energy. By employing Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 707 private landowners in the United States (US), we discovered that landowners being male, having higher income, and being a member of a state/national forestry organization were more likely to waste woody resources. Moreover, woody-resource-wasting landowners perceiving woody-biomass-based energy as a substitution for fossil fuel were more likely to sell wood. In contrast, those perceiving environmental costs over the benefits of woody-biomass-based energy were less likely to sell. These findings can be used as insights for policymakers, logging companies, and state agencies to find an additional supply of woody-biomass-based energy from landowners likely to waste woody resources. Full article

In order to design sustainable urban transport systems, the inclusion of the behaviors of different stakeholders is imperative. In this study, we formulated the interactions of behaviors between transport operator, landowner, workplace, residence, route and mode choices, and location of firms and businesses through a combined unified model of land-use and transport system. The commuters have two mode choices for traveling: private car and public bus. They are inclined to choose a transit mode with minimum traveling costs. We combined two models, maximization of operator profit constrained by bus frequency, while maintaining the formulation of other stakeholders through an assignment sub-model. The resulting formulation is bi-level, which is optimally solved for a small-sized instance containing two zones. The findings suggest that if the bus fare is reduced, the demand of public bus is increased. However, the operators’ profit is optimized within a certain range of fares and is lowered when the fare is too low or too high. It is determined that maximum bus frequency does not guarantee maximum profit to the service operator. The impacts of traveling costs on residence choice behavior suggest that if link fares are more, many of people opt not to travel between different zones. The analysis results presented in this paper are calculated for two types of link fares: a fixed fare (30 currency), and a range of link fare (5 to 100 currency). Different variants of the same formulation can be applied for real settings to better comprehend the nature of the model and its applications. Full article

The United States has experienced an even longer and more intense wildfire season than normal in recent years, largely resulting from drought conditions and a buildup of flammable vegetation. The derived stochastic dynamic model in this study was utilized to evaluate the interaction of wildfire risk mitigation policies for two adjacent landowners under various scenarios of forest benefits while accounting for full awareness of fire externalities. This study also evaluated the effectiveness of cost-share programs and fuel stock regulation and investigated under which scenarios of forest management interests the implementation of these policies encourages risk mitigation behaviors and yields larger reductions in social costs. The findings revealed that social costs significantly reduced after the implementation of cost-share programs and fuel stock regulation. Market-oriented adjacent landowners were more responsive to policy instruments compared to other types of neighboring landowners, and their responsiveness was greater for fuel stock regulation policies than for cost-share programs. Policymakers may introduce extra financial incentives or more rigorous fuel stock regulations to induce nonmarket-oriented landowners to undertake increased fuel management activities. Full article

Contemporary approaches to studying family forests have identified distinct subgroups of landowners through segmentation analysis. Our study expands on this approach, incorporating the concept of place to provide a novel perspective on how the cognition and emotions that create place attachment and landowner concerns influence certain landowner behaviors. We specifically modeled legacy planning and future landowner ownership behavioral intentions/behaviors. A mail survey was administered to a statewide sample of Maine family forest landowners that measured place attachment and landowner concerns regarding biophysical and social conditions on their woodland. Results based on the 878 respondents (54.9% response rate) indicated place attachment and landowner concern are related to legacy planning, land ownership, and development behavioral intentions, and when considered in conjunction with segmentation analysis, it was found the majority of family forest landowners in the sample experienced strong place attachment and moderate levels of concern. Our study suggests that forest outreach, forest policies and additional family forest research should further consider and incorporate the intangibles of the landowner experience. Full article

This research examines the relations between forest decrease and legal property security in Mato Grosso State, Brazil. The study area encompasses 133,090.4 km² of the Amazonian biome, belonging to the Brazilian Legal Amazon, located at the arc of deforestation where agriculture and cattle ranching compete with the native vegetation cover. Cadastral monitoring and certification of productive land plots are Brazil’s public policies to implement to tackle these environmental challenges. In this context, we crossed the Land Management System (SIGEF) dataset launched in 2013 from the National Institute for Agrarian Reform and the Amazon Deforestation Monitoring Program (PRODES) dataset from the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE). The analysis considered the 2013–2018 period with public and private land plots and evaluated the differences in smallholders and large landowners’ deforesting behavior. The results demonstrate that the primacy of certified properties was in private land (94%), with a small portion of the public land (6%). Most properties have <80% forest coverage on certification, corresponding to 85% on private properties and 95% on public properties. This fact is important because environmental legislation in the Amazon region establishes a legal reserve of 80% in forest areas. The results show that the smaller the property, the greater the percentage of proportional deforestation in the certification. In the biennium, considering before and after certification, a proportion of 8% of private properties and 28% of public properties with vegetation cover had deforestation. The results demonstrate the tendency for smaller properties to deforest proportionally more than larger ones. The annual difference series in properties registered in 2015 demonstrates that the highest deforestation occurrence was in the year of certification in private properties and the subsequent year in public properties. The SIGEF system is relatively new, requiring more time to establish a consolidated trend. The combination of property rights and effective compliance with environmental legislation allows the conservation of the forest. However, it is essential to improve inspection. Land ownership inserts the owner into a system of rules to properly use natural resources, constituting a legal instrument to guide human action. Full article

Exurban development is a prevalent cause of habitat loss and alteration throughout the globe and is a common land-use pattern in areas of high natural amenity value. We investigated the response of bird communities to exurban development in two contrasting North American regions, the Adirondack Park (New York) in the eastern US, and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Montana) in the Rocky Mountain West. We combined social and ecological data collection methods to compare the effects of exurban development on avian communities between the two landscapes, and, in exurban residential areas within them, to compare the relative roles of habitat structure, resource provisioning, and human disturbance in influencing avian habitat use. Contrasting with an earlier pilot study, we found differential effects of exurban development in the two regions, with birds generally more responsive in the Adirondack Park. Characteristics of habitat context and structure had larger influences on bird habitat use than human-associated resource provisioning or disturbance in both landscapes. The smaller magnitude and high variability in the responses of birds to landowner stewardship and/or disturbance suggest that broader geographical factors are highly important and that careful siting of developments on the landscape may be more successful at protecting wildlife communities than attempts to influence the behaviors of their inhabitants once built. Full article

Payments for ecosystems services (PES) can promote natural resource conservation by increasing compliance with environmental laws. Law enforcement and PES proponents assume that individuals make decisions about compliance based on expectations of gains, likelihood of being caught in non-compliance, and magnitude of sanctions. Brazil’s Forest Code, characterized by low levels of compliance, includes incentive and disincentive mechanisms. We interviewed landowners in the Atlantic Forest to understand their motivations to participate (or not) in a PES project, the effects of knowledge and perceptions of environmental regulations on compliance, and how both environmental regulations and PES affect land management decision-making. We found that neither expectations of financial gains nor PES payments drive behavioral change and that the perception of systemic corruption reduced compliance with environment regulations. There were important behavioral differences between long-term residents for whom the land is their main source of income and recent residents with little dependence on land-generated income. Full article

The practice of pasture-based livestock farming systems in South Africa is susceptible to climate-related events, low production output, income fluctuation, and by extension poor adaptive capacity. Understanding the importance and gravity of sustainable livestock farming through adaptive capacity has been identified as a tool to cope in the face of the climate-related event which extends to production output. It is to this end, that the study explored the adaptive capacity and the socioeconomic determinants that influence this capacity used by the pasture-based livestock farmers in the study area. Random sampling technique was used to select a sample of 277 pasture-based livestock farmers in the study area from and their responses concerning on demography, farm-based characteristics, production constraints and adaptive capacity were used. Data were analyzed, in which the descriptive statistics, composite scores, and the extended ordered probit model were used to establish the results. The findings revealed the adaptive capacity score of low, moderate, and high to be 40.1%, 43.7%, and 16.2% respectively. Correspondingly, the model estimate revealed the significant factors that affect the adaptive capacity to include: the use of labor (p < 0.05), other sources of income (p < 0.05). Conversely, the age of the farmers (p < 0.05) and landowners (p < 0.01) was found significant but had a negative relationship to adaptive capacity. By implication, the study concluded that there is a need for fruitions of policies that support farmers’ socioeconomic behavior to engage more in adaptive capacity and to improve the Sustainable Development Goals of the united nation as well as vision 2030 of the National Development Plan. Full article

The dramatic increase in the number of uncontrollable wildfires in the United States has become an important policy issue as they threaten valuable forests and human property. The derived stochastic dynamic model of this study is capable of determining optimal fuel treatment timing and level simultaneously and as a function of fire risk and fuel biomass dynamics. This study develops a stochastic dynamic model to evaluate the interaction of fuel treatment decisions for two adjacent landowners under various scenarios of misinformation about fire occurrence and spread. Findings indicate that a landowner tends to free ride on fuel treatment undertaken by his adjacent landowner. However, the study finds that the free riding potential of a landowner could be alleviated to some extent by having a neighboring landowner who is aware of fire spillover effects. In addition, the study reveals that the social cost resultant from free riding behavior is lower that the social cost associated with complete absence of fire externality awareness for both landowners. These findings imply that governments could introduce more effective educational programs to ensure that all landowners are fully aware of cross-parcel benefits of fuel treatment in order to align socially and privately optimal decisions, thus minimizing externality costs. Full article

Through different policies and measures reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation and enhancing conservation (REDD+) has grown into a way to induce behavior change of forest managers and landowners in tropical countries. We argue that debates around REDD+ in Brazil have typically highlighted rewards and punishments, obscuring other core interventions and strategies that are also critically important to reach the goal of reducing deforestation, supporting livelihoods, and promoting conservation (i.e., technology transfer and capacity building). We adopt Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and technologies of governance to provide a reading of the REDD+ discourse in Brazil and to offer an historical genealogy of the rewards and punishments approach. By analyzing practical elements from REDD+ implementation in the Brazilian Amazon, our research provides insights on the different dimensions in which smallholders react to rewards and punishments. In doing so, we add to the debate on governmentality, supplementing its focus on rationalities of governance with attention to the social practices in which such rationalities are embedded. Our research also suggests that the techniques of remuneration and coercion on which a rewards and punishments approach relies are only supporting limited behavioral changes on the ground, generating negative adaptations of deforestation practices, reducing positive feedbacks and, perhaps as importantly, producing only short‐term outcomes at the expense of positive longterm land use changes. Furthermore, the approach ignores local heterogeneities and the differences between the agents engaging in forest clearing in the Amazon. The practical elements of the REDD+ discourse in Brazil suggest the rewards and punishments approach profoundly limits our understanding of human behavior by reducing the complex and multi‐dimensional to a linear and rational simplicity. Such simplification leads to an underestimation of smallholders’ capacity to play a key role in climate mitigation and adaptation. We conclude by highlighting the importance of looking at local heterogeneities and capacities and the need to promote trust, altruism and responsibility towards others and future generations. Full article