Photo credit: Jodi Brandt.
By Chloe B. Wardropper, Rose A. Graves, Jodi Brandt, Morey Burnham, Neil Carter, Rebecca L. Hale, Vicken Hillis, and Matthew A. Williamson.
Biodiversity is declining at rates never seen in human history. Representatives of almost every country on Earth recently signed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to protect species from habitat loss and other threats. Achieving the goals laid out in the framework will require massive conservation efforts across diverse landscapes with different types of land ownership. Privately owned lands provide habitat and migration corridors to many threatened species. Conservation organizations contributing to biodiversity goals must, therefore, understand and work with private landowners.
We sought to understand how and why ranchers on private lands in the Western US undertake conservation actions. We wanted to understand how values, property rights concerns, and other factors influenced conservation decisions by ranchers in a region called the High Divide in Idaho and Montana. Ranches in this region are part of a mosaic of public and private lands supporting a critical wildlife migration corridor and headwater streams of large river systems. We received survey responses from 681 ranchers who live and work in the High Divide.
Our respondents have undertaken a variety of conservation actions, including invasive plant removal, installing wildlife-friendly fencing, and protecting buffers along waterways. We found that ranchers’ values, namely their sense of responsibility towards the larger region, and their perceptions of the effectiveness of their conservation actions contributed to adoption of conservation actions. We also found that ranchers with less concern about threats to their property rights were more likely to take conservation actions.
Our findings suggest that conservation organizations should design and communicate their programs with landowners’ worldviews and values in mind.
Relational Thinking 