Community and Conservation Survey in Urban, Suburban and Rural Massachusetts 2013-2018

The dynamics of forest cover and the ecosystem services they provide are shaped by the land use and management decisions of thousands of individual landowners and the land use planning and conservation actions of towns and environmental organizations. Through an interdisciplinary investigation of the land use and forest conservation practices across two urban-to-rural transects between Boston and Central Massachusetts, we investigated the complex and coupled socio-ecological processes that shape the structure, function, and transformation of forested landscapes and how examine these processes may vary along urban-to-rural gradients. The survey data archived here is one element of this larger coupled natural-human systems project. The Community and Conservation Survey collected data regarding landowners’ attitudes and management practices on a variety of issues linked to conservation and the use of their own land. The objectives were to collect data that (a) increase our understanding of how landowners’ attitudes and behaviors vary across urban-to-rural gradients and (b) can be coupled with biogeochemical measurements across the study region to model variation in management behaviors.