Adaptation of Canadian private forest owners to climate change: questionnaire form, response dataset, and variable description

This survey aims at collecting data on private forest owners’ adaptation to climate change throughout Canada. It was divided in six sections: general information on the respondents’ woodlots, past changes in their forest management since 2010, opinions and knowledge on climate change, potential (intended) adaptation of their forest practices to climate change, relationship to the world of forestry in the context of climate change, and socio-demographic questions. We chose the 2010-2022 time span considering the duration of private forests’ management plans, the turnover rate of silvicultural operations in even-aged stands, and individual climate memory.
The questionnaire was made of 33 questions, first formulated in French, then translated into English. A pilot test conducted on a sample of 14 individuals in June and July 2021 led to minor revisions, and the survey was made available from January, 10 to May, 22 2022.
We employed a 7-point Likert scale to measure respondents’ attitudes and opinions throughout the questionnaire. A 7-point scale has been shown to allow for a greater variability of the responses over scales with fewer points, thus leading to a more accurate measure of a respondent’s true views than a 5-point item scale, especially in online-distributed questionnaires (Finstad 2010). Each part of the questionnaire finished with a free comment section to express additional viewpoints or details to previous answers.
Respondents were first asked to read an introduction describing the goal, structure and origin of the questionnaire and to provide their consent to partake in the survey. Prior to answering the first questions, they were verified as Canadian non-industrial private forest owners through a self-report of the provinces or territories on which their forests are located. The survey took approximately 25 min to complete. To avoid dropout problems and encourage participation, respondents who completed the questionnaire were offered a chance for a financial reward (lottery draw).
We uploaded the questionnaire online using the online tool LimeSurvey. To disseminate the survey, we contacted 183 forest owners’ organizations and associations active in the Canadian forest sector and asked them to cast the questionnaire by email, newsletter and online media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter). Follow-up emails were sent out to those associations not answering after a first contact. To create a snowball effect, respondents were asked to forward the hyperlink of the survey to relatives, friends, or colleagues who may be interested to participate in the study. Among the 1030 forest owners who opened the survey link, 611 (59%) provided usable responses.
This research was conducted by Dr. Timothée Fouqueray, postdoctoral researcher at Pr. Jérôme Dupras’ Canada Research Chair in Ecological Economics. It was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Québec en Outaouais (Approval Code: 2022-1765). Written informed consent, was obtained from the participants.