Wolf Lethal Control and Livestock Depredations: Counter-Evidence from Respecified Models.

We replicated the study conducted by Wielgus and Peebles (2014) on the effect of wolf mortality on livestock depredations in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho states in the US. Their best models were found to be misspecified due to the omission of the time index and incorrect functional form. When we respecified the models, this replication failed to confirm the magnitude, direction and often the very existence of the original results. Wielgus and Peebles (2014) reported that the increase in the number of wolves culled the previous year would increase the expected number of livestock killed this year by 4 to 6%. But our results showed that the culling of one wolf the previous year would decrease the expected number of cattle killed this year by 1.9%, and the expected number of sheep killed by 3.4%. However, for every wolf killed there is a corresponding 2.2% increase in the expected number of sheep killed in the same year. The increase in sheep depredation appears to be a short term phenomenon.

Practical implications of understanding the influence of motivations on commitment to voluntary urban conservation stewardship.

Although the word commitment is prevalent in conservation biology literature and despite the importance of people's commitment to the success of conservation initiatives, commitment as a psychological phenomenon and its operation in specific conservation behaviors remains unexplored. Despite increasing calls for conservation psychology to play a greater role in meeting conservation goals, applications of the psychological sciences to specific conservation behaviors, illustrating their utility to conservation practice, are rare. We examined conservation volunteers' motivations and commitment to urban conservation volunteering. We interviewed key informant volunteers and used interview findings to develop psychometric scales that we used to assess motivations and commitment to volunteer. We surveyed 322 urban conservation volunteers and used factor analysis to reveal how volunteers structure their motivations and commitment to volunteer for urban conservation activities. Six categories of motivations and 2 categories of commitment emerged from factor analysis. Volunteers were motivated by desires to help the environment, defend and enhance the ego, career and learning opportunities, escape and exercise, social interactions, and community building. Two forms of commitment, affective and normative commitment, psychologically bind people to urban conservation volunteerism. We used linear-regression models to examine how these categories of motivations influence volunteers' commitment to conservation volunteerism. Volunteers' tendency to continue to volunteer for urban conservation, even in the face of fluctuating counter urges, was motivated by personal, social, and community functions more than environmental motivations. The environment, otherwise marginally important, was a significant motivator of volunteers' commitment only when volunteering met volunteers' personal, social, and community-building goals. Attention to these personal, social, and community-building motivations may help enhance volunteers' commitment to conservation stewardship and address the pressing challenge of retaining urban conservation volunteers.

Diagnostic reframing of intractable environmental problems: case of a contested multiparty public land-use conflict.

Intractable conflicts are omnipresent in environmental management. These conflicts do not necessarily resist resolution but need to be fundamentally transformed in order to reach agreement. Reframing, a process that allows disputants to create new alternative understandings of the problem, is one way of transforming these conflicts. Cognitive and interactional reframing are the two major approaches to conflict transformation. These approaches have some drawbacks. Cognitive reframing does not guarantee commensurate consideration of all disputants' views about the problem. Interactional reframing is prone to inter-disputant influences that interfere with presenting the problems as accurately as they exist in disputants' minds. Inadequate consideration of other disputants' views and inter-disputant influences often lead to inaccurate problem identification and definition. This in turn leads to solving the wrong problem, enabling intractability to persist. Proper problem identification and definition requires commensurate consideration of all sides of the conflict while minimizing inter-disputant influences. From a problem diagnosis perspective, we show how Q methodology is used to reframe environmental problems, rendering them more tractable to analysis while minimizing the influence of who disputants are talking with, and without ignoring the perspectives of other disputants. Using a case of contentious All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV) use in a state-administered public land, conflicting parties reframed the problem by prioritizing issues, outlining areas and levels of consensus and disagreement, and revealing inherent unrecognized and/or unspoken agendas. The reframing process surprisingly revealed several areas of common ground in disputants' diagnosis of the problem, including lack of emphasis on environmental protection and uncoordinated management factions. Emergent frames were misaligned on some issues, such as the behaviors of ATV riders and the role of management, including political and economic influences on decision making. We discuss how the reframing process enhances tractability of multiparty environmental problems. We point to some limitations of Q methodology as a tool for the diagnostic reframing of such problems.

Prognostic framing of stakeholders' subjectivities: a case of all-terrain vehicle management on state public lands.

Management of all-terrain vehicle (ATV) use on Minnesota state forest lands has a contentious history and land managers are caught between ATV riders, non-motorized recreationists, private landowners, and environmental advocates. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of framing distinct perspectives about ATV management on Minnesota state public forests, understand the structure of these management perspectives, identify areas of consensus and disagreement, specify which stakeholders hold the various perspectives, clarify stakeholder perceptions of other stakeholders, and explore the implications for ATV planning and management. Using Q methodology, three distinct perspectives about how we should or should not manage ATVs resulted from our analysis, labeled Expert Management, Multiple Use, and Enforcement and Balance. A surprising degree of unanimity among the three management perspectives was found. Although some of the areas of agreement would be difficult to implement, others would be relatively simple to put into place. We suggest that land managers focus on widely accepted management actions to ameliorate commonly recognized problems, which may ease tensions between stakeholders and make tackling the tougher issues easier.

Empirical social-ecological system analysis: from theoretical framework to latent variable structural equation model.

The social-ecological system (SES) approach to natural resource management holds enormous promise towards achieving sustainability. Despite this promise, social-ecological interactions are complex and elusive; they require simplification to guide effective application of the SES approach. The complex, adaptive and place-specific nature of human-environment interactions impedes determination of state and trends in SES parameters of interest to managers and policy makers. Based on a rigorously developed systemic theoretical model, this paper integrates field observations, interviews, surveys, and latent variable modeling to illustrate the development of simplified and easily interpretable indicators of the state of, and trends in, relevant SES processes. Social-agricultural interactions in the Logone floodplain, in the Lake Chad basin, served as case study. This approach is found to generate simplified determinants of the state of SESs, easily communicable across the array of stakeholders common in human-environment interactions. The approach proves to be useful for monitoring SESs, guiding interventions, and assessing the effectiveness of interventions. It incorporates real time responses to biophysical change in understanding coarse scale processes within which finer scales are embedded. This paper emphasizes the importance of merging quantitative and qualitative methods for effective monitoring and assessment of SESs.