In the United States, the management of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) has typically focused on improving hunting opportunities and mitigating human-deer conflicts. Yet the expansion and diversification of human communities and activities implies that human-deer interactions may also be diversifying. Approaches based on complex adaptive systems theories have been posited as a way to better attend to the diversity of these interactions between humans and wildlife. Using Indiana as a case, this study draws from the Integrated Adaptive Behavior Model (IABM) to understand human-deer interactions as a complex system. We use empirical social science to understand how citizens across Indiana perceive deer populations, what outcomes they desire, and how these perceptions could be integrated into Indiana's deer management plan. In Indiana, neither wildlife managers nor researchers have assessed public perceptions of deer beyond hunting and farming stakeholders. From May to September 2019, we collected 59 semistructured interviews and two focus groups (n = 14) with deer stakeholders including woodland owners, farmers, deer hunters, and urban area residents. Through mixed inductive-deductive coding, we found that Indiana citizens hold complex emotions toward deer regardless of their stakeholder identity. Factors influencing these emotions include past experiences, current livelihood and behavioral contexts, beliefs about responsibilities and ethics in deer management, and beliefs about other social groups. Our results suggest that the IABM, despite adding in much-needed complexity and realism to the analysis of human-wildlife interactions, still lacks explanatory power over several important dynamics that emerged from our interviews. Here, we discuss how mixed emotions, situational context, and power dynamics challenge conventional management approaches that focus narrowly on mitigating human-deer conflicts, and that reduce public interests to demographic categorizations. To better inform social-ecological governance, models of complex human behavior should account for power within management institutions and across management scales. Our work contributes a refined understanding of how multidimensional emotions and experiences influence public (dis)interest in natural resource management, and what this implies for managers who aim to balance competing social interests with ecological conditions.
Aircraft activity is expanding across Arctic Alaska, potentially changing social-ecological systems. Arctic communities report that aircraft disturb wildlife and negatively influence harvest practices and experiences. Limited data have restricted knowledge about the extent of aircraft activity over traditional harvest areas. Our objective was to use soundscape monitoring methods to document aircraft overflights around the rural subsistence-based community of Nuiqsut to inform impact mitigation processes. This study provides the first quantitative estimates of aircraft activity in rural Arctic Alaska. We deployed 20 acoustic monitoring systems in summer 2016 along travel corridors used to harvest caribou (Rangifer tarandus). Sound recordings captured 7465 aircraft events during peak caribou harvest season. Aircraft activity reached a median of 12 overflights per day near human development, approximately six times greater than undeveloped areas. Aircraft noise decreased incrementally with distance from human development. Given that subsistence harvesters report that aircraft startle caribou and prefer to avoid aircraft themselves, this result implies that they will need to travel farther for a successful harvest, incurring higher costs of fuel, equipment, and effort. Such costs could be prohibitive for many harvesters. Our research demonstrates that acoustic data can aid in understanding how human-to-human interactions impact social-ecological dynamics in the Arctic.
The traditional harvest of wild resources carries significant nutritional, economic, and sociocultural values for rural residents in the Arctic, especially for Indigenous subsistence communities. Rural communities in the Alaskan Arctic have expressed concern that aircraft activity from industry, commercial hunting, research, and tourism disrupts their harvest of wildlife, particularly caribou (Rangifer tarandus). However, little research exists on how aircraft impact harvest opportunities. Our objective was to assess the extent of scientific knowledge on aircraft-harvester interaction in the Arctic through a systematic search of the available literature. We found that no peer-reviewed publications addressed the conflict between aircraft and harvesters in the region. Some literature addressed aircraft impacts to subsistence species, but did not discuss how those impacts would affect local harvesters. Most research has been directed towards studying aircraft impacts on wildlife or humans in urbanized areas rather than in rural, subsistence communities. Therefore, we expanded our review to draw from gray literature (e.g., public records, government documents) to synthesize the current state of concern and perceptions on aircraft disturbance to subsistence harvesters. Based on the gray literature, we found that harvester frustrations were primarily directed toward low-flying aircraft and non-local operations. However, an absence of quantitative information on the extent of interaction between aircraft activity and harvesters hinders an objective assessment of the conflict. Mitigating conflict will require research focused on this data gap and may begin with better cooperation among rural communities, aircraft users, and decision-makers.
Wildlife agencies in North America desire to incorporate broader public interests into decision-making so they can realize the principle of governing wildlife in the public trust. Public satisfaction is a key component of good governance but evaluating satisfaction with wildlife management focuses on traditional user experiences rather than perceptions of agency performance. We draw from political science, business, and conservation social science to develop a multidimensional concept of satisfaction with wildlife management that includes agency performance, service quality, trust in the managing agency, and informational trust. We use data collected from a 2021 survey of Indiana residents to analyze the social and cognitive determinants of satisfaction with white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) management. Quantile regression models revealed that respondents’ acceptability of management methods and deer-related concerns most strongly affected performance and quality components, whereas respondent characteristics mostly affected trust components of the index. Future research should associate satisfaction with key variables we did not fully capture including perceived control, psychological distance, and norms of interaction between wildlife agencies and the public. Expanding agency conceptions of public satisfaction represents a critical step toward public trust thinking and the practice of good wildlife governance in North America.
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