Landowner and Practitioner Perspectives on Private Land Conservation Programs

<p>Efforts to reverse declines in native grasslands benefit from agricultural policies that encourage private land conservation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) improved conservation across landscapes but enrollment has declined. We used sequential exploratory mixed methods to compare landowner and conservation practitioners’ perceptions, evaluate perceived benefits, and identify potential improvements to CRP. Focus groups of practitioners informed a quantitative survey of landowners who had properties >160 total acres in Nebraska. Results suggest potential misalignment in perceptions between practitioners and landowners. Practitioners were concerned that conservation, especially of wildlife, was secondary to profit. But the majority of landowners valued CRP-related ecosystem services, including native pollinators. Practitioners posited that younger landowners were primarily profit motivated, but CRP enrollment did not differ by demographics. Practitioners and landowners identified rule complexity as a major challenge and practitioner–landowner relationships as critical to success. Findings suggest that practitioners may underestimate non-economic motivations and illuminate opportunities to encourage private land conservation.</p

About tab.

<p>The "About" tab directs the user to the published source of the pheasant distribution model and to the websites of the developers and cooperating agencies.</p

Custom management tab.

<p>The "Custom Management" tab prompts users to select a Nebraska county of management interest. The slider widgets default to reflect the average landcover of a township in that county, and the reactive plots update as the slider bars are manipulated to show landcover and predicted relative pheasant habitat suitability.</p

Pheasant Habitat Simulator workflow.

<p>The strength of the shiny environment is that it reactively submits the user’s land use change decisions to the analytical procedure. The analytical procedure runs in the background to render both predictions and graphical outputs without reloading the page, creating a seamless data exploration experience.</p

Welcome tab.

<p>The “Welcome” tab displays the current pheasant habitat suitability predictions derived from Jorgensen et al. (2014) and instructs the user on how to navigate the application.</p