Effects of perceptions of forest change and intergroup competition on community-based conservation behaviors.

Approximately one quarter of the earth's population directly harvests natural resources to meet their daily needs. These individuals are disproportionately required to alter their behaviors in response to increasing climatic variability and global biodiversity loss. Much of the ever-ambitious global conservation agenda relies on the voluntary uptake of conservation behaviors in such populations. Thus, it is critical to understand how such individuals perceive environmental change and use conservation practices as a tool to protect their well-being. We developed a participatory mapping activity to elicit spatially explicit perceptions of forest change and its drivers across 43 mangrove-dependent communities in Pemba, Tanzania. We administered this activity along with a questionnaire regarding conservation preferences and behaviors to 423 individuals across those 43 communities. We analyzed these data with a set of Bayesian hierarchical statistical models. Perceived cover loss in 50% of a community's mangrove area drove individuals to decrease proposed limits on fuelwood bundles from 2.74 (forest perceived as intact) to 2.37 if participants believed resultant gains in mangrove cover would not be stolen by outsiders. Conversely, individuals who believed their community mangrove forests were at high risk of theft loosened their proposed harvest limits from 1.26 to 2.75 bundles of fuelwood in response to the same perceived forest decline. High rates of intergroup competition and mangrove loss were thus driving a self-reinforcing increase in unsustainable harvesting preferences in community forests in this system. This finding demonstrates a mechanism by which increasing environmental decline may cause communities to forgo conservation practices, rather than adopt them, as is often assumed in much community-based conservation planning. However, we also found that when effective boundaries were present, individuals were willing to limit their own harvests to stem such perceived decline.

Efectos de las percepciones del cambio forestal y la competencia intergrupal en los comportamientos de conservación comunitarios Resumen Aproximadamente una cuarta parte de la población mundial aprovecha directamente los recursos naturales para satisfacer sus necesidades diarias. Estos individuos se ven desproporcionadamente obligados a alterar sus comportamientos en respuesta a la creciente variabilidad climática y la pérdida de biodiversidad global. Gran parte de la ambiciosa agenda de conservación global se basa en la adopción voluntaria de comportamientos de conservación en dichas poblaciones. Por lo tanto, es fundamental comprender cómo esas personas perciben el cambio ambiental y utilizan las prácticas de conservación como herramienta para proteger su bienestar. Desarrollamos una actividad de mapeo participativo para generar percepciones espacialmente explícitas del cambio forestal y sus causantes en 43 comunidades dependientes de manglares en Pemba, Tanzania. Administramos esta actividad junto con un cuestionario sobre preferencias y comportamientos de conservación a 423 personas en esas 43 comunidades. Analizamos estos datos mediante un conjunto de modelos estadísticos jerárquicos bayesianos. La pérdida de cobertura percibida en el 50% del área de manglares de una comunidad llevó a los individuos a reducir los límites propuestos para los paquetes de leña de 2.74 (bosque percibido como intacto) a 2.37 si los participantes creían que las ganancias resultantes en la cobertura de manglares no serían robadas por personas ajenas a la comunidad. Por el contrario, las personas que creían que los bosques de manglares de su comunidad corrían un alto riesgo de robo flexibilizaron los límites de cosecha propuestos de 1.26 a 2.75 haces de leña en respuesta a la misma disminución percibida del bosque. Por lo tanto, las altas tasas de competencia entre grupos y pérdida de manglares estaban impulsando un aumento, que se auto reforzaba, en las preferencias de aprovechamiento insostenibles en los bosques comunitarios de este sistema. Este hallazgo muestra un mecanismo por el cual el creciente deterioro ambiental puede hacer que las comunidades renuncien a las prácticas de conservación, en lugar de adoptarlas, como a menudo se supone en gran parte de la planificación de la conservación basada en la comunidad. Sin embargo, también encontramos que cuando existían límites efectivos, los individuos estaban dispuestos a restringir sus propias cosechas para frenar esa disminución percibida.

Social Vulnerability to Irrigation Water Loss: Assessing the Effects of Water Policy Change on Farmers in Idaho, USA.

In the Eastern Snake Plain of Idaho, increasing rates of groundwater extraction for irrigation have corresponded with the adoption of more efficient irrigation technologies; higher use and lower incidental recharge have led to increasing groundwater scarcity. This paper assesses farmer vulnerability to a water resource policy that responds to that scarcity by reducing availability of groundwater for irrigation by 4-20%. Using results from a household survey of impacted farmers, we examine vulnerability in two stages, contributing to theorization of farmer vulnerability in a changing climate as well as producing important regional policy insights. The first stage, multimodel selection and inference, analyzes the primary predictors of two forms of vulnerability to groundwater scarcity among this population of farmers. The second stage, a segmentation analysis, highlights policy-relevant variation in adaptive capacity and in vulnerability predictors across the population. Individual-level results indicate that key indicators of vulnerability include several dimensions of adaptive capacity and sensitivity. At the population level, we find that reductions in sensitivity may play an important role in reducing farmer vulnerability. Accelerating global environmental change will require agriculture in arid and semi-arid regions to adapt to shifts in water availability. As water resources shift, institutional contexts and policy landscapes will shift in parallel, as seen with the reduction in groundwater availability in our case study. These institutional shifts may change the face of adaptation and farmer vulnerability in unexpected ways. Our results indicate that such institutional shifts could lean on efforts to enhance farmer adaptive capacity or reduce farmer sensitivity as mechanisms for reducing farmer vulnerability to adaptation policy changes.

Private land conservation decision-making: An integrative social science model.

Owners and managers of private lands make decisions that have implications well beyond the boundaries of their land, influencing species conservation, water quality, wildfire risk, and other environmental outcomes with important societal and ecological consequences. Understanding how these decisions are made is key for informing interventions to support better outcomes. However, explanations of the drivers of decision making are often siloed in social science disciplines that differ in focus, theory, methodology, and terminology, hindering holistic understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptual model of private land conservation decision-making that integrates theoretical perspectives from three dominant disciplines: economics, sociology, and psychology. The model highlights how heterogeneity in behavior across decision-makers is driven by interactions between the decision context, attributes of potential conservation behaviors, and attributes of the decision-maker. These differences in both individual attributes and context shape decision-makers' constraints and the potential and perceived consequences of a behavior. The model also captures how perceived consequences are evaluated and weighted through a decision-making process that may range from systematic to heuristic, ultimately resulting in selection of a behavior. Outcomes of private land behaviors across the landscape feed back to alter the socio-environmental conditions that shape future decisions. The conceptual model is designed to facilitate better communication, collaboration, and integration across disciplines and points to methodological innovations that can expand understanding of private land decision-making. The model also can be used to illuminate how behavior change interventions (e.g., policies, regulations, technical assistance) could be designed to target different drivers to encourage environmentally and socially beneficial behaviors on private lands.

Bringing forecasting into the future: Using Google to predict visitation in U.S. national parks.

In recent years, visitation to U.S. National Parks has been increasing, with the majority of this increase occurring in a subset of parks. As a result, managers in these parks must respond quickly to increasing visitor-related challenges. Improved visitation forecasting would allow managers to more proactively plan for such increases. In this study, we leverage internet search data that is freely available through Google Trends to create a forecasting model. We compare this Google Trends model to a traditional autoregressive forecasting model. Overall, our Google Trends model accurately predicted 97% of the total visitation variation to all parks one year in advance from 2013 to 2017 and outperformed the autoregressive model by all metrics. While our Google Trends model performs better overall, this was not the case for each park unit individually; the accuracy of this model varied significantly from park to park. We hypothesized that park attributes related to trip planning would correlate with the accuracy of our Google Trends model, but none of the variables tested produced overly compelling results. Future research can continue exploring the utility of Google Trends to forecast visitor use in protected areas, or use methods demonstrated in this paper to explore alternative data sources to improve visitation forecasting in U.S. National Parks.

Applying a cultural multilevel selection framework to the adoption of sustainable management practices in California viticulture.

In light of the ongoing environmental impacts of agriculture, understanding farmer adoption of sustainable management practices (SMPs) is an important priority. Relatively little work in agricultural adoption has explicitly examined the multilevel dynamics of adoption decision-making. Yet because many SMPs involve cooperative dilemmas-they are individually costly but provide group benefits-understanding the dynamics of both individual and group level behavioral change is critical. In this paper, we argue that cultural evolutionary theory is well suited to examining the emergence and spread of cooperative SMPs, and we illustrate this claim by applying a cultural multilevel selection (CMLS) framework to the adoption of SMPs on the part of winegrape growers in California, USA. Using survey data from over 800 winegrape growers in 3 regions, we estimate the individual-level costs and group-level benefits of 44 different SMPs. We then relate this to variation in their adoption within and between winegrape growing regions to characterize the scope for cultural group selection of the various practices. We also identify a number of mechanisms that might plausibly explain the observed patterns of variation, including various forms of cultural group selection. We highlight the added value of this perspective with respect to the established approaches and outline the data requirements for researchers to conduct similar studies in other settings. Our results underscore the potential for a cultural evolutionary perspective to shed light on the multiscale mechanisms driving adoption of SMPs and, more generally, the promise of cultural evolutionary approaches to supplement existing analytical toolkits in sustainability science.

Sustainability partnerships and viticulture management in California.

Agricultural regions in the United States are experimenting with sustainability partnerships that, among other goals, seek to improve growers' ability to manage their vineyards sustainably. In this paper, we analyze the association between winegrape grower participation in sustainability partnership activities and practice adoption in three winegrowing regions of California. Using data gathered from a survey of 822 winegrape growers, we find a positive association between participation and adoption of sustainable practices, which holds most strongly for practices in which the perceived private benefits outweigh the costs, and for growers with relatively dense social networks. We highlight the mechanisms by which partnerships may catalyze sustainable farm management, and discuss the implications of these findings for improving sustainability partnerships. Taken together, we provide one of the most comprehensive quantitative analyses to date regarding the effectiveness of agricultural sustainability partnerships for improving farm management.

Preventative Disease Management and Grower Decision Making: A Case Study of California Wine-Grape Growers.

Preventative disease management is challenging to farmers because it requires paying immediate costs in the hopes of returning uncertain future benefits. Understanding farmer decision making about prevention has the potential to reduce disease incidence and minimize the need for more costly postinfection practices. For example, the grapevine trunk-disease complex (esca, Botryosphaeria dieback, Eutypa dieback, and Phomopsis dieback) significantly affects vineyard productivity and longevity. Given the chronic nature of the infections and inability to eradicate the fungal pathogens, the preventative practices of delayed pruning, applications of pruning-wound protectants, and double pruning (also known as prepruning) are the most effective means of management. We surveyed wine-grape growers in six regions of California on their use of these three practices. In spite of acknowledging the yield impacts of trunk diseases, a substantial number of respondents either choose not to use preventative practices or incorrectly adopted them in mature vineyards, too late in the disease cycle to be effective. Growers with more negative perceptions of cost efficacy were less likely to adopt preventative practices or were more likely to time adoption incorrectly in mature vineyards. In general, preventative management may require strong intervention in the form of policy or extension to motivate behavioral change.

Cultural group selection follows Darwin's classic syllogism for the operation of selection.

The main objective of our target article was to sketch the empirical case for the importance of selection at the level of groups on cultural variation. Such variation is massive in humans, but modest or absent in other species. Group selection processes acting on this variation is a framework for developing explanations of the unusual level of cooperation between non-relatives found in our species. Our case for cultural group selection (CGS) followed Darwin's classic syllogism regarding natural selection: If variation exists at the level of groups, if this variation is heritable, and if it plays a role in the success or failure of competing groups, then selection will operate at the level of groups. We outlined the relevant domains where such evidence can be sought and characterized the main conclusions of work in those domains. Most commentators agree that CGS plays some role in human evolution, although some were considerably more skeptical. Some contributed additional empirical cases. Some raised issues of the scope of CGS explanations versus competing ones.

The Role of Pest Control Advisers in Preventative Management of Grapevine Trunk Diseases.

Vineyards with trunk diseases (Botryosphaeria dieback, Esca, Eutypa dieback, and Phomopsis dieback) can have negative returns in the long run. Minimizing economic impacts depends on effective management, but adopting a preventative practice after infection occurs may not improve yields. Pest control advisers may reduce grower uncertainty about the efficacy of and need for prevention, which often entails future and unobservable benefits. Here, we surveyed advisers in California to examine their influence over grower decision-making, in the context of trunk diseases, which significantly limit grape production and for which curative practices are unavailable. Our online survey revealed adviser awareness of high disease incidence, and reduced yields and vineyard lifespan. Advisers rated both preventative and postinfection practices positively. Despite higher cost estimates given to postinfection practices, advisers did not recommend preventative practices at higher rates. High recommendation rates were instead correlated with high disease incidence for both preventative and postinfection practices. Recommendation rates declined with increasing cost for preventative, but not for postinfection, practices. Our findings suggest that even when advisers acknowledge the risks of trunk diseases, they may not recommend preventative practices before infection occurs. This underscores the importance of clear outreach, emphasizing both the need for prevention and its long-term cost efficacy.

Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence.

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is "no," then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is "yes" and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation.

Linking knowledge and action through mental models of sustainable agriculture.

Linking knowledge to action requires understanding how decision-makers conceptualize sustainability. This paper empirically analyzes farmer "mental models" of sustainability from three winegrape-growing regions of California where local extension programs have focused on sustainable agriculture. The mental models are represented as networks where sustainability concepts are nodes, and links are established when a farmer mentions two concepts in their stated definition of sustainability. The results suggest that winegrape grower mental models of sustainability are hierarchically structured, relatively similar across regions, and strongly linked to participation in extension programs and adoption of sustainable farm practices. We discuss the implications of our findings for the debate over the meaning of sustainability, and the role of local extension programs in managing knowledge systems.