Wolf Lethal Control and Livestock Depredations: Counter-Evidence from Respecified Models.

We replicated the study conducted by Wielgus and Peebles (2014) on the effect of wolf mortality on livestock depredations in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho states in the US. Their best models were found to be misspecified due to the omission of the time index and incorrect functional form. When we respecified the models, this replication failed to confirm the magnitude, direction and often the very existence of the original results.

Practical implications of understanding the influence of motivations on commitment to voluntary urban conservation stewardship.

Although the word commitment is prevalent in conservation biology literature and despite the importance of people's commitment to the success of conservation initiatives, commitment as a psychological phenomenon and its operation in specific conservation behaviors remains unexplored. Despite increasing calls for conservation psychology to play a greater role in meeting conservation goals, applications of the psychological sciences to specific conservation behaviors, illustrating their utility to conservation practice, are rare. We examined conservation volunteers' motivations and commitment to urban conservation volunteering.

Diagnostic reframing of intractable environmental problems: case of a contested multiparty public land-use conflict.

Intractable conflicts are omnipresent in environmental management. These conflicts do not necessarily resist resolution but need to be fundamentally transformed in order to reach agreement. Reframing, a process that allows disputants to create new alternative understandings of the problem, is one way of transforming these conflicts.

Prognostic framing of stakeholders' subjectivities: a case of all-terrain vehicle management on state public lands.

Management of all-terrain vehicle (ATV) use on Minnesota state forest lands has a contentious history and land managers are caught between ATV riders, non-motorized recreationists, private landowners, and environmental advocates. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of framing distinct perspectives about ATV management on Minnesota state public forests, understand the structure of these management perspectives, identify areas of consensus and disagreement, specify which stakeholders hold the various perspectives, clarify stakeholder perceptions of other stakeholders, and explore the implications for ATV planning and management. Using Q methodology, three distinct perspectives about how we should or should not manage ATVs resulted from our analysis, labeled Expert Management, Multiple Use, and Enforcement and Balance.

Empirical social-ecological system analysis: from theoretical framework to latent variable structural equation model.

The social-ecological system (SES) approach to natural resource management holds enormous promise towards achieving sustainability. Despite this promise, social-ecological interactions are complex and elusive; they require simplification to guide effective application of the SES approach. The complex, adaptive and place-specific nature of human-environment interactions impedes determination of state and trends in SES parameters of interest to managers and policy makers.