Conservation Outreach Research Articles

Using digital mobile games to increase the support for nature conservation

AbstractDigital games are an increasingly dominant form of digital entertainment with billions of players globally. While most of these games have a commercial focus, fields like public health and education have seen a growth of “serious games,” which aim to solve real world problems. In the context of biodiversity conservation, mobile games have been controversial, with some raising concerns around the way digital channels risk replacing the very nature they portray, therefore deepening a “nature‐deficit disorder.” We ran a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of the mobile game “Kākāpō Run” on pro‐environmental behaviors amongst a cohort of 200 participants in New Zealand. Kākāpō Run was developed by a UK conservation charity, and aims to increase the support for Kākāpō conservation, as well as to increase pro‐environmental behaviors linked to Kākāpō conservation. Study participants completed a 10‐minute questionnaire before spending 1 hour playing their assigned mobile game over seven days. This was monitored by asking participants to share screenshots of their app usage for the duration of the experiment. After this, all participants re‐took the questionnaire. We found a positive impact across some knowledge and attitudes questions, behavioral intentions linked to willingness to volunteer time and support policies aiming to remove invasive predators, as well as manage pet cats actively. However, we found no change in willingness to donate or actual donations. This research showcases both the potential of mobile games for conservation outreach and marketing, and the importance of rigorous impact evaluation. We call for conservationists engaged in designing and promoting mobile games to approach game design and evaluation in a more research‐centered way to help develop an evidence base around the intended and unintended consequences of game playing. This mainstreaming of gaming science across conservation will be critical to allow mobile games to realize their potential as a leading communication channel.

Evaluating the Educational Value of the Reef Stakes® Card Game for Coral Reef Conservation: An Intervention Study

Environmental awareness, particularly on reefs and their threats in Malaysia, is generally low. This comes as long-term reef health monitoring by Reef Check in Malaysia reveals a trend of declining reef health across all surveyed sites. Reef conservation education needs to be intensified. Gamification can be a powerful tool to enhance marine education and public awareness by making learning about marine topics engaging, interactive, and enjoyable. This study examined the educational value of a marine-themed card game, Reef Stakes®, by measuring the environmental attitudes and coral reef knowledge of players before and after playing the game. Two groups of 35 university students of varied disciplines and 26 non-university participants were recruited. A significant increase in knowledge of the coral reefs after the game, for the non-student group, suggests that there is a positive effect of the Reef Stakes® card game. Findings will inform the potential widespread use of gamification in reef conservation outreach and education.

Farmer typologies integrating latent and observed characteristics: Insights for soil and water conservation outreach

One of the fundamental rules of effective communication is to “know your audience.” When engaging farmers in conservation in the U.S. and elsewhere where their participation is voluntary, communication should start with the fundamental recognition that farmers are heterogeneous in many ways; their attitudes, values, and motivations, as well as their farms’ biophysical and economic characteristics, can influence their behaviors. Previous typology research in Iowa, USA using data from a panel survey of farmers, revealed heterogeneity by identifying four types of farmers—Conservationists, Deliberative, Productivists, and Traditionalists—based on latent class analysis of variables measuring varied dimensions of awareness, attitudes, beliefs, perceived motivations, and barriers to practice adoption. The study presented in this article advances the typology by associating observable variables from the same survey (e.g., farmer demographics, farm enterprises, participation in conservation programs, adoption of conservation practices) with the four farmer types. The Conservationist type was the most educated and indicated a high intention of adopting cover crops. The Deliberative type tended not to have a conservation plan with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service. The Productivist farmer farmed the most land, rented and owned, and had the highest no-till implementation in land size and percentage of the group. The Traditionalist type rented the least amount of land. We expect outreach professionals, watershed coordinators, and conservation practitioners can use observable characteristics to segment the farmer population and improve conservation messages by tailoring them to the specific farmer types, leading to a higher return on investment in terms of money, time, and goodwill.

Locating and Designing Participatory Conservation in the Museum: an analysis of Chinese practices

With rich cultural heritage resources, there are increasing expectations and demands about engaging the public with conservation in China. This thesis intends to demonstrate the participatory conservation practices that can be enlightening for museum visitors. This paper focuses on the cases of Chinese practices at the Shaanxi History Museum and the Hainan Museum. It explores the aims, design and location of the conservation labs in each setting, and seeks to unpack the physical, intellectual and authority boundaries in this engagement space. The research builds upon the analyses of semi-structured interviews with professionals, individual observations of the two case study spaces, and a wide ranging literature review covering participation, museum space, museology and conservation. The thesis concludes that participatory conservation provides great opportunity and insights to meet audiences’ curiosity. This is achieved by opening the professional intellectual space to the public and inspiring people’s critical thinking together with their passion to care about cultural heritage. The thesis evidences how both Chinese and European museums care about the visiting experience of audiences and conservation outreach. However, it argues how Chinese museums might be seen to give attention to the security of objects – in terms of having more original work in areas open to the public. Whereas, in contrast, European museums there is a focus on communicating, interpreting and sharing the process of engaging audiences.

Women taking action: Multisession learning circles, storytelling, and an ecosystem of relationships for conservation

Current conservation outreach largely focuses on single-day, presentation-heavy events typically addressed to farmers, mostly men. Our project created a multisession learning circle series for a cohort of women landowners that introduced conservation education through storytelling and a more conversation-driven format. Its objective was to build relationships that would empower women landowners to take action. Its outcomes, however, far exceeded expectations. The program’s facilitators and the women landowner-participants not only built relationships of action but also developed a partnership that resembles what researchers call a cognitive ecology. This cognitive ecology involves collaboration among diverse and equal partners who expand each other’s thinking and capacity, use tools and technologies to extend cognition (maps, soil tests, lease agreements, and simulation models), and interact with the environment. As a cognitive ecology, our group—facilitators and women landowners—produced this article together, as coauthors. Our collaboration offers a storytelling- and exchange-based framework to engage individuals whose needs have not been fully met through conventional programming. Our preliminary findings suggest that conservation programming might better empower a larger range of underinvolved stakeholders by offering multisession programming that builds an ecosystem of relationships for action.

How Engineers and Roadside Vegetation Managers Maintain Roadside Vegetation in Iowa, USA.

Recently the value of roadside vegetation as habitat for pollinators has gained increased attention, particularly in areas dominated by agriculture where there is little native vegetation available. However, many factors, including safety, cost, public perception, erosion control, and weedy plants must be considered when managing roadside vegetation. Although their decisions influence thousands of hectares of public rights-of-way, how engineers and roadside managers maintain roadside vegetation has been the subject of little research. In this study, we surveyed county engineers and roadside managers who manage vegetation along secondary roads in Iowa, USA to assess how they maintain roadside vegetation. Some counties employ roadside managers, who often have an environmental sciences background, to implement the on-the-ground management of roadside vegetation, while some counties use other staff. Compared to engineers, roadside managers more strongly agreed that using the ecological principles of integrated roadside vegetation management (IRVM) provided environmental benefits. Engineers in counties with a roadside manager more strongly agreed that IRVM practices reduce the spread of invasive species and provide attractive roadsides. Both engineers and roadside managers mentioned challenges to managing roadside vegetation, including interference with some native plantings by adjacent landowners, and ranked safety and soil erosion concerns as the highest priorities when making decisions. Four in ten roadside managers said their counties had protected native plant community remnants on secondary roadsides. Our findings can inform conservation outreach efforts to those responsible for managing roadside vegetation, and emphasize the importance of addressing safety and soil erosion concerns in roadside research and communications.

Identifying engaging bird species and traits with community science observations

Identifying rates at which birders engage with different species can inform the impact and efficacy of conservation outreach and the scientific use of community-collected biodiversity data. Species that are thought to be “charismatic” are often prioritized in conservation, and previous researchers have used sociological experiments and digital records to estimate charisma indirectly. In this study, we take advantage of community science efforts as another record of human engagement with animals that can reveal observer biases directly, which are in part driven by observer preference. We apply a multistage analysis to ask whether opportunistic birders contributing to iNaturalist engage more with larger, more colorful, and rarer birds relative to a baseline approximated from eBird contributors. We find that body mass, color contrast, and range size all predict overrepresentation in the opportunistic dataset. We also find evidence that, across 472 modeled species, 52 species are significantly overreported and 158 are significantly underreported, indicating a wide variety of species-specific effects. Understanding which birds are highly engaging can aid conservationists in creating impactful outreach materials and engaging new naturalists. The quantified differences between two prominent community science efforts may also be of use for researchers leveraging the data from one or both of them to answer scientific questions of interest.

The medium over the message: Differential knowledge of conservation outreach activities and implications for threatened species

Conservation outreach is regularly conducted to increase support for conservation by altering local awareness and attitudes about species or environmental issues. However, there is often little assessment of the effectiveness of these activities. We investigated knowledge of past conservation outreach in 26 villages adjacent to Bawangling National Nature Reserve, Hainan, China, which contains the last population of the Hainan gibbon (Nomascus hainanus). The medium of past outreach activities was reported most frequently by interviewees, followed by who delivered them and the outreach topic, with the fewest interviewees reporting the specific messages being communicated (the consequences of following conservation management policies). Negatively-framed messages, emphasizing prohibited activities and associated punishments, were reported more than positively-framed messages that aimed to foster conservation support. Male interviewees and those with higher education levels reported more aspects of past activities. The Hainan gibbon had higher salience than other threatened native species, and reporting the occurrence (but not necessarily the content) of past outreach was associated with increased likelihood of knowing that gibbons were threatened. These findings highlight the need for conservation outreach to increase both exposure and retention of key messages among target audiences. Meaningful and concrete conservation benefits should be communicated to local communities, and the effectiveness of outreach using a flagship species could be expanded to also improve awareness of other conservation-priority species within the same landscape.

Increasing agricultural conservation outreach through social science

Increasing agricultural conservation outreach through social science

Stepping into the Wildeverse: Evaluating the impact of augmented reality mobile gaming on pro‐conservation behaviours

Abstract Promoting pro‐conservation behaviours has become a priority for conservation organisations world‐wide. Yet, current engagement strategies still face a number of barriers to creating successful interventions at the scale needed to meet global sustainability challenges. Online and mobile games enjoy immense world‐wide popularity, tapping into an audience not normally reached through conventional conservation outreach channels. Despite this potential to be a new, high impact and scalable platform for promoting pro‐environmental behaviours, the opportunities within digital games for conservation have thus far been little explored and organisations have called for robust impact evaluations for this medium. Therefore, we investigated the effectiveness of the augmented reality game Wildeverse, which seeks to generate support for ape conservation and encourage pro‐environmental behaviours. We conducted a randomised control trial to experimentally compare the impacts of this game against watching a documentary, a conventional conservation outreach intervention. We compared changes in participants' knowledge, attitudes and revealed donation behaviours across the two groups and found that games performed as well as documentaries in supporting positive environmental knowledge and attitudes. The results gathered from this study provide experimental insight into the potential for the broader use of digital games for conservation outreach and also provide evidence against the argument that gaming can detract from real‐world environmental problems creating a disconnect with these issues. However, results from this study could not provide any evidence that Wildeverse was successful in achieving its additional aim of encouraging players to donate to conservation, which provides evidence for the existence of an environmental values–behaviour gap in conservation gaming. The gaming industry is global and rapidly growing and should no longer be ignored as an avenue for conservation outreach. We recommend several ways in which future studies can expand on this work to better understand how to effectively harness the power of digital games to drive tangible change that benefits biodiversity. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Conservation outreach that acknowledges human contributions to climate change does not inhibit action by U.S. farmers: Evidence from a large randomized controlled trial embedded in a federal program on soil health.

Technologies and practices that reduce the environmental impacts of US agriculture are well documented. Less is known about how best to encourage their adoption. We report on the results of a large randomized controlled trial conducted with nearly 10,000 agricultural producers in the United States. The experiment was embedded in US Department of Agriculture outreach efforts to improve soil conservation practices. USDA varied the content of mailings to test two sets of competing theories about outreach to agricultural producers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find no evidence that acknowledging the link between climate change and agricultural production discourages conservation action. Furthermore, we find that producers who were invited to a webinar were less likely to take any action to learn more about conservation practices than producers who were not told about the webinar, a result that runs counter to the popular wisdom that offering more options leads to more action.

Evolving systems of pro-environmental behavior among wildscape gardeners

Cities are important sites for encouraging more widespread adoption of pro-environmental behaviors (PEB) that benefit humans and wildlife alike. Wildscaping, a type of stewardship PEB in which people create wildlife-friendly gardens, has been promoted by conservation organizations, yet fundamental questions remain about what wildscaping entails and what factors contribute to sustained involvement. We used a social-ecological systems (SES) framework to examine behavior change among urban residents in Colorado who had received wildscape gardening certification and training. We employed semi-structured interviews (n = 11), quantitative surveys (n = 63), participant observation, and document analysis, and analyzed data using grounded theoretical techniques. We found that program participants engaged in 14 gardening behaviors targeting habitat creation on their properties, and 11 advocacy behaviors targeting social change. These behaviors were driven by 10 interconnected motivations, including mutual refuge with wildlife, changing norms, aesthetic beauty, and sense of place. Engagement in wildscaping was sustained over time by multi-scalar contextual factors, including social interactions and formal program participation. These findings offer the first SES understanding of how urban residents begin and expand their engagement in wildscape gardening and advocacy. Future research should focus on how understanding of SES characteristics can enable more effective behavior change programs in urban landscapes. Possible ways that conservation outreach could consider SES include encouraging evolving feedback loops between participants’ motivations and behaviors, emphasizing reciprocal benefits to individuals and their social-ecological context, and promoting coordinated involvement by different types of actors at multiple scales of the system.

Developing farmer typologies to inform conservation outreach in agricultural landscapes

Understanding factors that motivate conservation behavior among farmers is crucial to addressing societal, soil, water, and wildlife conservation goals. Farmers employ soil conservation practices to maintain agricultural productivity while minimizing impacts to water and wildlife in the long-term. The majority of conservation programs are voluntary in nature and some farmers are more willing and/or able to implement conservation practices than others. To inform the development of more effective conservation outreach and incentive programs, we created a farmer typology using data from three waves (2015, 2016, 2018) of a longitudinal survey of 358 farmers from Iowa, a highly productive agricultural state in the U.S. Midwest. Using multivariate analysis (Principal Component Analysis, and Cluster Analysis), we employed 26 summated scale variables measuring largely unobservable and latent constructs related to conservation, including awareness, attitudes, beliefs, and perceived motivations and barriers to practice adoption. Through this analysis, we identified four types of farmers-Conservationist, Deliberative, Productivist, and Traditionalist—based on the salient characteristics of each group. “Conservationist” farmers scored highest on measures of stewardship motivations and identity. “Deliberative” farmers appeared to be favorably disposed toward conservation, but also seem to consider agronomic and economic impediments more than other groups. “Productivist” farmers had the highest scores on profit motivation and emphasis on input use. “Traditionalist” farmers reported being heavily influenced by family members and scored highest on social and regulatory influence on conservation motivations. Detailed understanding of between-groups differences on key conservation-related factors can contribute to developing targeted messages for specific subgroups of a given population, potentially resulting in higher adoption of voluntary conservation programs in Iowa and beyond.

Social-psychological correlates of personal-sphere and diffusion behavior for wildscape gardening

Achieving conservation outcomes requires concerted engagement from many people across diverse societies. However, many conservation practitioners struggle to engage new audiences. Research suggests one effective strategy to reach nonengaged individuals is to encourage interested conservation actors to share information, provide resources and assistance, and organize local events to recruit others; we call these “diffusion behaviors.” Previous studies suggest few conservation actors who engage in personal-sphere PEB also engage in diffusion PEB, potentially because these behaviors have unique barriers which have yet to be identified. We investigated if there are different psychosocial drivers of diffusion and personal-sphere PEB by surveying residents in Colorado, USA about their personal-sphere wildscape behaviors (e.g. planting native plants) and diffusion wildscape behaviors (e.g. helping a friend plant native plants). Including diffusion-specific psychosocial variables led to better predictions of both personal-sphere and diffusion PEB. Diffusion-specific self-efficacy, social and environmental response efficacy, and reputational concerns about perceived competence were significant predictors of diffusion behavior. Diffusion-specific environmental response efficacy and injunctive norms enforced through sanctioning significantly predicted personal-sphere behavior. Personal-sphere self-efficacy and dynamic norm beliefs predicted both behavior types. Our findings suggest that research should consider personal-sphere and diffusion PEB as distinct domains and should investigate the power of diffusion-specific perceptions. Conservation outreach programs seeking to encourage diffusion of PEB may benefit from designing programming to try to change these perceptions.

Fostering Marine Environmental Stewardship: New Tactics Needed to Engage Millennials

The generation subculture theory asserts that as each generation comes of age and begins to harness political and economic power, their unique value-set will shape social and environmental outcomes. With this in mind, we undertook a preliminary social survey that explored the relationship between birth cohort (the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials), and marine environmental values, behaviour, and preferences. The findings demonstrate a declining value is placed on the marine environment across the generations, with an associated decrease in pro-environmental behaviours. The results emphasise the importance of targeted conservation outreach, particularly for Millennials.

An Effects Assessment Framework for Dry Forest Conservation

On the Ground • Large patches of dry conifer forests have burned as high intensity crown fire, threatening life, property, and natural resources. • Conservation practices such as mechanical thinning can reduce crown fire potential while promoting other benefits such as restoring forest heterogeneity, reducing post-fire erosion risk, and improving wildlife habitat. • We report on a pilot study to apply landscape-scale effects modeling in the Colorado Front Range as a potential framework for forestlands CEAP. • Spatially explicit estimates of conservation benefits to multiple resources provide a quantitative means to evaluate competing projects and to prioritize conservation outreach.

The role of social norms in conservation outreach

Self-reported behaviors often serve as dependent variables in surveys associated with outreach campaigns. Social desirability bias (i.e., reporting what is perceived as socially acceptable) and cei...

Motivating landowners to recruit neighbors for private land conservation.

Encouraging motivated landowners to not only engage in conservation action on their own property but also to recruit others may enhance effectiveness of conservation on private lands. Landowners may only engage in such recruitment if they believe their neighbors care about the conservation issue, will positively respond to their conservation efforts, and are likely to take action for the conservation cause. We designed a series of microinterventions that can be added to community meetings to change these beliefs to encourage landowner engagement in recruitment of others. The microinterventions included neighbor discussion, public commitment making, collective goal setting, and increased observability of contributions to the conservation cause. In a field experiment, we tested whether adding microinterventions to traditional knowledge‐transfer outreach meetings changed those beliefs so as to encourage landowners in Hawaii to recruit their neighbors for private lands conservation. We delivered a traditional outreach meeting about managing the invasive little fire ant (Wasmannia auropunctata) to 5 communities and a traditional outreach approach with added microinterventions to 5 other communities. Analysis of pre‐ and post‐surveys of residents showed that compared with the traditional conservation outreach approach, the microinterventions altered a subset of beliefs that landowners had about others. These microinterventions motivated reputationally minded landowners to recruit and coordinate with other residents to control the invasive fire ant across property boundaries. Our results suggest integration of these microinterventions into existing outreach approaches will encourage some landowners to facilitate collective conservation action across property boundaries.

More “Bank” for the Buck: Microtargeting and Normative Appeals to Increase Social Marketing Efficiency

Successful conservation in the United States relies on collective stewardship by millions of private landowners, challenging those agencies and nongovernment organizations tasked with engagement and outreach. Perennially limited resources compound this challenge, highlighting a deep need for efficient social marketing. In the following research, we test the efficacy of two social marketing strategies—microtargeting and normative appeals—through a randomized controlled trial of an integrated social marketing campaign targeting riparian landowners in the Pennsylvania portion of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. We used a microtargeting algorithm to predict landowners’ likelihood of responding to a conservation outreach campaign to create treatment groups of high-likelihood prospects versus random prospects (i.e., no microtargeting). A normative appeal was also included as an experimental factor in the campaign communicating that forested riparian buffer investments were common among similar landowners. Among microtargeted landowners, we observed a 66% increase in response to a riparian restoration survey compared to the control group. Additionally, we found a significant influence of a normative message among random (nonmicrotargeted) prospects, increasing response by 23% over the control group. We conclude conservation outcomes may be more efficiently achieved by deploying these marketing techniques on a wider scale to a variety of conservation challenges.

Nature for whom? How type of beneficiary influences the effectiveness of conservation outreach messages

In recent years the conservation community has engaged in debate over value in nonhuman nature, especially as it relates to motivations for conservation. Many have expressed the assumption that more people are willing to support conservation when emphasis is placed on the human benefits of nonhuman nature, rather than the value of nonhuman nature for its own sake. To test this assumption, we designed an online survey investigating how the type of beneficiary (human, nonhuman, or both) depicted in outreach messages affects two metrics of support: attitudes toward the message and donations for a conservation organization. Each respondent viewed one message highlighting humans, nonhumans, or both as conservation beneficiaries. Predicting that the effect of beneficiary type would depend partially on individual differences, we also measured respondents' moral inclusivity, i.e., the values and beliefs they hold with regard to human and various nonhuman entities. Although beneficiary type did not affect attitudes, we report several key findings for donation. Compared to messages depicting only nonhuman beneficiaries, messages depicting only human beneficiaries were associated with lower likelihood of donation overall and, among less morally inclusive respondents, lower donation amounts. At the same time, messages depicting both human and nonhuman beneficiaries were not associated with more positive donation outcomes than messages depicting only nonhuman beneficiaries. Our results suggest that highlighting humans as conservation beneficiaries may not most effectively generate social support for conservation. Messages advocating the protection of nonhuman nature for its own sake may produce the most consistently positive donation outcomes.