Perceptions of Social Network Influence: Key Players' Insights Into Power, Conflict, and Collaboration at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Conflict among stakeholders is a familiar challenge to natural resource managers and researchers. Fostering trust and collaboration among diverse stakeholder groups is, therefore, a primary goal for natural resource conservation. One tool often used to understand stakeholder relationships and to foster collaborative conservation is social network analysis (SNA), a method that identifies patterns in social relationships among members of a population using networks and graph theory (Scott 2017). Through an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach, this study applied SNA to better understand social dynamics among six stakeholder groups associated with Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats (Bonneville; USA). We sought to (1) build social network models (i.e., sociograms) depicting Bonneville-related social interactions among stakeholders, (2) identify potentially influential individuals (i.e., key players) in Bonneville's stakeholder network; and engage these key players in (3) 'member-checking' social interaction trends gathered during the data collection year, and (4) discussing perceptions of their network's influential social dynamics. Sharing SNA data and sociograms through semi-structured qualitative interviews with key players verified four seasons' worth of social interaction trends within and among Bonneville stakeholder groups. These conversations also evoked key players' reflection on social power dynamics, social network evolution, the influence of research into the Bonneville social network, and introspection about social connections therein. These emergent themes support applying SNA and qualitative interviews with key players in natural resource social networks to yield valuable information for managers who seek to foster collaboration while avoiding or abating resource-related conflict among stakeholder groups.

Rapid Resource Change and Visitor-Use Management: Social-ecological Connections at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Parks and protected areas are complex, and managers often need integrated social-ecological science-based information that illuminates the dynamic interactions between the biophysical and social processes. However, modeling and determining social-ecological connections are difficult due to disciplinary paradigms, divergent research questions, and data sets representing different scales. During this investigation, researchers sought to evaluate social-ecological linkages at a large salt pan (Bonneville Salt Flats) in western Utah (US). Specifically, the investigation evaluated how the changing level and location of salt-crust moisture and ponding water influenced visitors' spatial distribution of use and important elements of their experience. The findings indicate that visitors travel more distance, spend more time recreating, and use the Salt Flats in higher densities during dry conditions. However, the results also highlight that importance levels ascribed to specific aspects of the visitor experience remained relatively stable regardless of changes in salt-crust moisture and ponding water. Illuminating such linkages is important because most natural resource issues in society, including resources at the Bonneville Salt Flats, are not solely ecological or social in nature but characterized by deeper enmeshment between the two.