Predicting pasture and forest landowner intention to create early successional habitat

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 or >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 five years. We used boosted regression trees to determine
which factors best predicted the intention to carry out each strategy. We
were able to effectively predict (accuracy > 75%) 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 (i.e., 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 creation of ESH, especially if such
efforts highlighted the benefits to pollinator species, water quality, and
enhanced opportunities for hunting and other types of recreation.