Role of Personal Connections in Shaping Decisions About Private Forest Use in Central Massachusetts 2008

We begin with a simple premise: Social and ecological systems are interconnected in complex ways. Forests are, perhaps, one of the most intriguing examples of this interconnectedness--particularly those in private ownerships. Forested landscapes are essential in maintaining human systems through the provision of multiple ecosystem services that span public (e.g., clean water, nutrient cycling) and private (e.g., fiber, maple syrup, home sites) goods. However, the majority of forestland in the Eastern United States is a mosaic of small landholdings (less than 20 ha) where property management is largely uncoordinated. On such landscapes, decentralized, ownership-centric decision-making defines the mix of ecosystem services provided and the landscape patterns present now and in the future. While somewhat effective for less spatially sensitive ecosystem services (e.g., fiber production), this ownership-centric approach is ill suited to spatially sensitive ones (e.g., water quality) and may, in some cases, be detrimental to them (e.g., habitat fragmentation). Improving the ecological and landscape sensitivity of private forest conservation and management is a major challenge facing researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in sustaining forest ecosystems. Central to unraveling this challenge is a fundamental understanding of how landowners simultaneously fit within their social and bio-physical landscapes. Despite their importance to broader forest sustainability, our collectively understanding of forest landowners has been primarily concerned with individual landowners and/or individual properties. For example, most research surrounding private forest landowners centers on primarily agent-based theories of behavior or decision-making (e.g., rational actor, theory of planned behavior). This perspective is useful in predicting and effecting behavior at broad scales, but lacks the specificity needed to address local landscape concerns and/or opportunities. Other studies have begun to unpack the social and ecological connections at landscape scales to provide useful insights and suggestions, but often take case study and/or qualitative approaches and do not adequately separate confounding contextual drivers (e.g., threat of regulation) that make application to other settings with different contexts difficult. The purpose of this exploratory study is to formally investigate the social networks of private landowners and the connection of those networks to the bio-physical landscape. Our work will specifically consider the networks of information sources and the specific role played by resource professionals in key land management decisions (i.e., harvest timber from, place conservation easement on the land) that can fundamentally alter/preserve landscape patterns. Our specific objective is to characterize and compare the egocentric networks that inform landowner decision-making related to two land management decisions, and assess relative satisfaction with the outcomes of those decisions. Landowners can acquire (directly or indirectly, through publications or other media) information about forests from "experts", "peers", or a combination of both. Experts would include those with professional training (e.g., foresters, ecologists, land trust staff, etc.,) or equivalent experience (e.g., loggers). In many cases, landowners may pay experts to carry out portions of the forest management practice. However, experts are not always directly employed by the landowner, but are instead employed by others to work with them (e.g., foresters employed by public agencies or sawmills, land trust staff). Peers usually do not have equivalent training, but may (or may not) be knowledgeable on aspects salient to the decision. Experts and peers are important sources of information in decision-making and this is true in the private landowner context (see e.g., Sisock 2007; West et al 1988). In evaluating experts and peers, past research has shown that decision-makers may consider and weigh several dimensions of the source including expertise, homophily, accessibility, information quality, trust, and cost (e.g., Borgatti and Cross 2003; Rogers 2003; Cross and Sproul 2004; Levin and Cross 2004). With experts, additional concerns may arise from oversight challenges described in agency theory due to asymmetric information and/or misaligned objectives (e.g., Eisenhardt 1989). Recent studies (e.g., Rickenbach et al 2005; Gass et al, In review) indicate that landowners face some agency concerns in dealing with professional foresters. And, some perspectives perceive that landowners "underutilize" experts in decision-making regarding their property (Butler and Leatherberry 2004).