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Biodiversity conservation is contingent upon managing human behaviour and, at times, changing behaviour. This is particularly relevant to the illegal trade in wildlife and wildlife products, both flora and fauna. Driven by dynamics of consumer demand and illicit supply, mitigation of illegal trade requires a fuller appreciation of human behaviour and methods to change it. In various sectors, social influence, behavioural insights, social marketing and human-centred approaches trend towards mainstream practice and policy application. However, in the context of conservation and wildlife trafficking, these approaches and their usefulness are not well-articulated nor application widespread. Here, we provide a practical overview of relevant behaviour change methods and frameworks. We discuss their usefulness and potential application to mitigating the illegal wildlife trade, in general and consumer demand, in particular.

Knowledge of the relationships among psychological constructs such as values and motivations that influence proenvironmental behavior provides public land management agencies with guidance on how to minimize stakeholder impacts on the environment. A rich body of research has demonstrated that values form a tripartite structure underlying environmental concern, encompassing biospheric, egoistic, and altruistic values; however, recent work has suggested hedonic values are also an instrumental basis for environmental concern. Few studies have tested this proposition. We contend that hedonic values are instrumental in explaining the psychological processes that gird individual decisions, particularly in nature-based settings where stakeholder decisions are compelled by leisure pursuits. Our results indicate that place-based motivations, particularly escape from the pressures of everyday life, can help close the prominent value–action gap and explain why outdoor recreationists engage in minimum-impact activities specified in the U.S. Leave No Trace educational outreach program.

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While the social, economic, and ecological impact of recreational fisheries is well established, the inherent diversity of both fisheries resources and resource users, particularly anglers, continues to present a challenge for management agencies. To better understand the diversity of recreational anglers, agencies often utilize survey methods to collect data on angler characteristics and preferences. However, obtaining necessary and representative data is becoming more challenging, exacerbated by declining response rates and an increase in the number of single and mixed‐mode survey designs researchers can choose to collect data. We examined three survey designs—surface mail with a Web push, e‐mail, and mixed mode—each with varying modes of solicitation and response, in the context of a statewide survey of licensed Texas anglers. Our findings illustrated that response rates varied considerably among these three survey designs. We also observed significant variation in terms of anglers’ sociodemographic characteristics based on solicitation and response modes of each survey design. Interestingly, we observed limited variation in terms of anglers’ behaviors, preferences, and motivations. Our results highlight the need for researchers and managers to be aware of the various survey designs available and the variability that particular survey designs can introduce into data. Received August 1, 2014; accepted March 2, 2016 Published online July 13, 2016