Consider the source: The impact of media and authority in outreach to private forest and rangeland owners

Abstract

Over half of the United States is privately owned. Improving environmental sustainability requires that the scientific and management communities provide effective outreach to the many landowners making decisions about land use and management practices on these lands. We surveyed California forest and rangeland owners in ten counties throughout the state to assess the impact of existing outreach and identify gaps in information distribution and content. Although a number of organizations provide land management advice highly-ranked by landowners, no individual organization currently reaches more than 30% of forest and rangeland owners, and these groups together reach less than 60% of landowners. The lowest ranked advice came from wildlife and land management agencies, whereas the highest ranked advice came from private consultants and advisory organizations. The ecosystem services provided by forests and rangelands are strongly influenced by conservation scale, and this appears to be recognized in current outreach efforts. Owners of large properties (>200 ha) were substantially more likely to have received land management advice than smaller-sized properties, and from a broader group of organizations. As ownerships become increasingly fragmented, outreach focus and methods will need to shift to more effectively target the owners of smaller properties. On the other hand, some major outreach goals, such as conservation of wildlife, ranchland, or agricultural communities, will continue to rely on effective outreach to owners of larger properties.

Introduction

Approximately 60% of the United States is in private ownership (Hilty and Merenlender, 2003). Partly as a function of historic land allocation policy, private lands in the United States tend to have better water access, more biodiversity, and higher soil quality than public lands (Scott et al., 2001). The conservation value of private lands is well-documented in the literature (Wilcove et al., 1996, Wilcove et al., 1998, Knight, 1999, Kautz and Cox, 2001, Hilty and Merenlender, 2003, Maestas et al., 2003, Hansen et al., 2005). Management and conservation, however, is challenged by the fact that private lands are fragmented into individual ownerships each managed by a landowner with unique goals, constraints, and characteristics. Since 1950, there has been a five-fold increase in the United States in low-density rural housing – typically called “ex-urban” development (Brown et al., 2005). This pattern of fragmentation is projected to continue in the upcoming decades with more landowners owning smaller-sized parcels (Alig and Plantinga, 2004, Nowak and Walton, 2005, Theobald et al., 2005, White et al., 2009, Theobald, 2010). The cumulative impact of the many discrete decisions made by these individuals will undeniably play an important role in shaping future forest and rangeland ecosystems and the services they provide.

Landowners are beset with many challenges, including economic and environmental uncertainty, changing social goals, and evolving regulations (Best, 2002). It is crucial that agencies, scientists, policy-makers, educators, and outreach professionals work with landowners to create practical approaches to mitigating environmental problems, and to encourage sound land management. Working with landowners, however, requires an adaptive approach. Recent studies indicate ownership dynamics are changing on forest and rangelands across the United States (Butler and Leatherberry, 2004, Hansen and Brown, 2005, Kendra and Hull, 2005, Gosnell et al., 2006). New landowners often have less experience with vegetation management than traditional foresters and ranchers, and a greater focus on recreational and residential qualities. Outreach to these landowners will require effective communication from the scientific and management communities (Butler and Leatherberry, 2004, Kittredge, 2004) which will in turn require a clear and comprehensive understanding of the needs and characteristics of these landowners, and a critical analysis of existing and potential outreach strategies and sources. This paper reports the results of a statewide survey of California forest and rangeland landowners, with a focus on their use of and response to existing outreach strategies and information sources.

Forests and rangelands, loosely defined as land that is not cultivated or developed, are faced with a variety of environmental issues, including habitat fragmentation and loss of ecological integrity through conversion to urban or ex-urban uses (Maestas et al., 2003); risks due to catastrophic insect epidemics (Hicke and Jenkins, 2008) and disease (Rizzo and Garbelotto, 2003); or wildfire hazard (Moritz and Stephens, 2008). In California, there are many organizations that provide land management information about these topics to landowners, including government resource agencies, non-profit organizations, or university Cooperative Extension. This breadth of information and information providers makes California a good location to study the efficacy of landowner outreach.

Educational outreach can be an effective strategy to influence landowner attitudes toward natural resource management (Marynowski and Jacobson, 1999, Loomis et al., 2001, Rhodes et al., 2002, Lauber and Knuth, 2004). The overall impact of educational outreach, however, can vary substantially based on the type of information being delivered (Lauber and Knuth, 2004), the method of communication (McCaffrey, 2004, Morris et al., 2007), the geographic location of the recipients (Brunson and Shindler, 2004), awareness of the landowner that information is available (Measells et al., 2005), or by the general regard for the organization providing the information (Wright and Shindler, 2001, Shindler et al., 2009, Olsen and Shindler, 2010).

Among these, the method of communication has been shown to be a particularly important factor influencing the impact of educational outreach. Several recent studies examined the effectiveness and/or “trustworthiness” of different media sources and found significant differences between media types. In general, landowners appear to prefer direct personal contact over mass media as an information source (Wright and Shindler, 2001, McCaffrey, 2004, Toman et al., 2006, Ryan, 2009, Shindler et al., 2009). Toman et al. (2006) distinguished between unidirectional information sources (those that provide a one-way flow of communication) and interactive information sources (personal contact or on-the-ground learning experiences) and found that people are significantly more likely to be familiar with unidirectional methods, but interactive methods were rated as more helpful. Measures of perceived trustworthiness, however, were similar for both methods, though individual media sources within each method were rated differently. Most notably, public meetings and the Internet consistently received low ratings for trustworthiness.

Several studies have also looked at the perceived trustworthiness of the information provider and found it to be an important factor influencing outreach effectiveness. Wright and Shindler (2001) looked at information sources in watershed management in Oregon and found that the majority of landowners in their study felt that environmental groups were untrustworthy and of little use as an informational source, whereas the state forestry and wildlife departments, and university representatives were trusted by most respondents. Shindler et al. (2009) similarly found that university representatives, public agencies, and personal contacts were considered trustworthy by a majority of landowners in regards to information on fire management, forest industry groups were only considered trustworthy by about half of the respondents, and very few respondents rated environmental groups as trustworthy. However, trust in agencies, general knowledge, and attitudes can vary substantially across study areas, indicating that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to management, outreach, or relationship building will be less successful than an approach which integrates local contextual factors (Brunson and Shindler, 2004, Olsen and Shindler, 2010).

Based on these studies, it is clear that outreach can be an effective strategy to influence landowner attitudes, but the ultimate success of the outreach depends on the method of communication, the agent of delivery, and the geographical context. A review of the literature, however, found limited information on the current distribution of landowner outreach, and whether information is effectively reaching all landowners or just targeted subgroups. To fill this gap, and to help inform future landowner outreach, we surveyed a sample of California forest and rangeland owners from ten counties across the state.

The overall objectives of this paper are to:

• provide a general profile of our sample population;

• assess the extent and perceived quality of land management information and advice from a range of natural resource organizations;

• identify where landowners of different parcel size classes receive land management information and advice; and

• identify factors that influence the receptivity of forest and rangeland landowners to outreach.