Segmentation to Focus Outreach: Behavioral Intentions of Private Forest Landowners in Pennsylvania

Metcalf, Alexander L.; Gruver, Joshua; Finley, James C.; Luloff, A. E.

doi:10.5849/jof.15-030

Cited by 13 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Within Virginia, the focal counties (dark green) from north to south are Highland, Bath, Giles, Tazewell, and Smyth counties. (Daley et al 2004, Dayer et al 2016, Metcalf et al 2016. We organized the survey into separate sections according to these sets of questions.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Landowner values.-Landowner values associated with their property have been reported to be a predictor of intention to manage (Dayer 2013, Metcalf et al 2016, Drescher et al 2017. We asked survey respondents to rank the importance of several items with regard to their property and the surrounding landscape using a 5-point Likert scale from not important to very important, with moderately important as the midpoint.…”

Section: Survey Topicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent decades, these natural disturbances have become less common, in part because of land use change and fragmentation, resulting in the need for active creation and maintenance of ESH using humaninduced disturbance (e.g., prescribed fire, cattle grazing, timber management) across large enough spatial scales to support declining ESH-dependent species (Dettmers 2003, Streilein et al 2011. Depending on the land cover type (forest, shrubland, open pasture), creating and maintaining ESH requires very different management approaches, yet much of the research on private landowner willingness to promote ESH, and much of the outreach to engage private landowners, has focused on harvesting timber (Dayer et al 2016, Metcalf et al 2016. The focus on forests is not surprising because landowners can obtain income through timber harvests while simultaneously promoting wildlife habitat.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Predicting Pasture and Forest Landowner Intention to Create Early Successional Habitat

et al. 2021

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As human land uses expand across the landscape, the management practices of private landowners are an essential part of effective conservation. Early successional habitats (ESH) and the species that depend on them are a priority in the eastern United States, and efforts to create ESH on private lands has primarily focused on forest landowners and timber harvests. Private pasture lands in a forested landscape present an additional opportunity to create and maintain ESH, yet our understanding of landowner values and attitudes about management strategies in pastures is lacking. To address this, we surveyed private landowners in 5 Virginia counties who own ≥10.1 ha at >610 m elevation (n = 503). Our primary objective was to understand how a variety of factors such as landowner values, past experience with habitat management, and perceived barriers to carrying out habitat management are associated with private landowner intention to carry out 7 ESH management strategies (i.e., reduced mowing, reduced grazing, timber harvests within forest, timber harvests at a field-forest border, prescribed fire, use of machinery, and use of herbicides to control invasive species) for the benefit of wildlife in the next 5 years. We used boosted regression trees to determine which factors best predicted the intention to carry out each management strategy. We were able to predict accuracy >75% of the time for landowner intention to engage in open pasture and timber management strategies. Landowner values were not consistent across the different management strategies; landowners likely to reduce mowing or grazing valued ecological aspects of their land (e.g., pollinator habitat, water quality), whereas landowners likely to harvest timber valued hunting and revenue. Past experience with wildlife management was the strongest predictor of likelihood to reduce mowing and grazing. Our results suggest that expanding outreach efforts to include pasture management options would engage a broader set of landowners in creating ESH, especially if such efforts highlighted the benefits to pollinator species, water quality, and enhanced opportunities for hunting and other types of recreation.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Survey Topicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Predicting Pasture and Forest Landowner Intention to Create Early Successional Habitat

et al. 2021

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“…Some researchers have used market segmentation to construct descriptive typologies of the general public based on climate change beliefs (e.g., Maibach, Roser-Renouf, & Leiserowitz, 2009) or to create classifications of landowners based on reasons for owning land and their intentions for management (e.g. Metcalf, Gruver, Finley, & Luloff, 2015). To date, conservation-oriented segmentation research has offered no strategic guidance for maximizing social marketing efficacy at the individual/person level, hindering its utility, especially to practitioners.…”

Section: Conceptual Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

More “Bank” for the Buck: Microtargeting and Normative Appeals to Increase Social Marketing Efficiency

Metcalf

Angle

Phelan

et al. 2018

Social Marketing Quarterly

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Successful conservation in the United States relies on collective stewardship by millions of private landowners, challenging those agencies and nongovernment organizations tasked with engagement and outreach. Perennially limited resources compound this challenge, highlighting a deep need for efficient social marketing. In the following research, we test the efficacy of two social marketing strategies—microtargeting and normative appeals—through a randomized controlled trial of an integrated social marketing campaign targeting riparian landowners in the Pennsylvania portion of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. We used a microtargeting algorithm to predict landowners’ likelihood of responding to a conservation outreach campaign to create treatment groups of high-likelihood prospects versus random prospects (i.e., no microtargeting). A normative appeal was also included as an experimental factor in the campaign communicating that forested riparian buffer investments were common among similar landowners. Among microtargeted landowners, we observed a 66% increase in response to a riparian restoration survey compared to the control group. Additionally, we found a significant influence of a normative message among random (nonmicrotargeted) prospects, increasing response by 23% over the control group. We conclude conservation outcomes may be more efficiently achieved by deploying these marketing techniques on a wider scale to a variety of conservation challenges.

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“…) or landowners (Metcalf et al. ). Still, these marketing‐based approaches inform message development for mass broadcast, contributing little to customized appeals at the individual level.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Microtargeting for conservation

Metcalf

Phelan

Pallai

et al. 2019

Conservation Biology

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Widespread human action and behavior change is needed to achieve many conservation goals. Doing so at the requisite scale and pace will require the efficient delivery of outreach campaigns. Conservation gains will be greatest when efforts are directed toward places of high conservation value (or need) and tailored to critical actors. Recent strategic conservation planning has relied primarily on spatial assessments of biophysical attributes, largely ignoring the human dimensions. Elsewhere, marketers, political campaigns, and others use microtargeting—predictive analytics of big data—to identify people most likely to respond positively to particular messages or interventions. Conservationists have not yet widely capitalized on these techniques. To investigate the effectiveness of microtargeting to improve conservation, we developed a propensity model to predict restoration behavior among 203,645 private landowners in a 5,200,000 ha study area in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (U.S.A.). To isolate the additional value microtargeting may offer beyond geospatial prioritization, we analyzed a new high‐resolution land‐cover data set and cadastral data to identify private owners of riparian areas needing restoration. Subsequently, we developed and evaluated a restoration propensity model based on a database of landowners who had conducted restoration in the past and those who had not (n = 4978). Model validation in a parallel database (n = 4989) showed owners with the highest scorers for propensity to conduct restoration (i.e., top decile) were over twice as likely as average landowners to have conducted restoration (135%). These results demonstrate that microtargeting techniques can dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of conservation programs, above and beyond the advances offered by biophysical prioritizations alone, as well as facilitate more robust research of many social–ecological systems.

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Segmentation to Focus Outreach: Behavioral Intentions of Private Forest Landowners in Pennsylvania

Cited by 13 publications

References 26 publications

Predicting Pasture and Forest Landowner Intention to Create Early Successional Habitat

Predicting Pasture and Forest Landowner Intention to Create Early Successional Habitat

More “Bank” for the Buck: Microtargeting and Normative Appeals to Increase Social Marketing Efficiency

Microtargeting for conservation

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