Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Balancing Act: Ecological Interventions And Decision Tradeoffs To Preserve Wilderness Character, Lucy A. Lieberman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Global climate change, land use intensification and increasing development are impacting federal wildernesses in new and unprecedented ways. Ecological restoration is one tool that that wilderness managers are using to combat degradation, though the decision to intervene in wilderness is complicated by the Wilderness Act’s legal mandate to preserve wilderness character and demonstrate managerial restraint. The purpose of this study is to document a baseline of ecological interventions that have occurred in the NWPS over the last five years, and to understand how wilderness managers make decisions related to ecological interventions. I sent a quantitative survey to over five hundred …

The Last Best Hope: Are Voluntary Conservation Agreements Effective Tools For Protecting Imperiled Species?, Sophie B. Tsairis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances, or CCAAs, are little known, voluntary conservation agreements that protect imperiled wildlife on private lands. These agreements have emerged over the past decade and have had mixed results in providing adequate protections for candidate species.

Landowners, private industries, state and federal agencies, and environmental nonprofits, are using CCAAs as tools to eliminate the need for an endangered species listing. An Endangered Species Act listing can lead to land-use uncertainty for private landowners and this threat is the main incentive to enroll in a CCAA. When landowners enroll in CCAAs they are agreeing to provide specific …

Social Justice In Social-Ecological Systems: Resilience Through Stakeholder Engagement, Frederick I. Lauer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Successful management of social-ecological systems (SES) is predicated on quality collaborative exchanges between project stakeholders and management. The Southwest Crown of the Continent Collaborative (SWCC) Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) provided an opportunity to explore landscape scale collaborative management and SES outcomes. Global change and future uncertainty of landscapes prompted the SWCC to employ restoration treatment alternatives throughout 1.4 million acres of forests, most of which are publicly held. The SWCC currently monitors environmental and economic variables, with plans to monitor social variables. This thesis formalizes a proposed framework to investigate SES resilience, and explores public engagement as an …