University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, Solomons, MD, 20688, USA.
Psychology Department, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, 23284, USA.
Environ Manage. 2024 Dec;74(6):1173-1189. doi: 10.1007/s00267-024-02043-8. Epub 2024 Sep 15.
Encouraging agricultural landowners to adopt conservation practices is crucial to enhancing ecosystem services in privately-owned farm landscapes. To improve engagement with landowners and increase adoption rates, much research has been dedicated to investigating how different psychological, social, economic, and political factors correlate with adoption. However, these studies largely measure adoption as a discrete, binary event. Doing so obscures sequences of landowner decisions and engagement techniques that conservation practitioners use to encourage landowners' progression through the adoption process. We report on two studies that contribute to the emerging literature on the agricultural conservation practice adoption process and the varying effectiveness of engagement techniques throughout. First, interviews with conservation practitioners in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, USA, yielded a preliminary model of the different stages in the adoption process and what techniques practitioners find effective at each stage. Second, an online experiment examined the effectiveness of a visualization intervention across two sequential outcomes in the adoption process, seeking further information and contacting a practitioner. Our results suggested that practitioners use a wide variety of engagement techniques, most of which are unique to a single stage in the adoption process, and that the effectiveness of the visualization technique varies substantially between different stages. Together these studies outline a suite of techniques that other practitioners may find effective at different stages of the adoption process, and suggest that research can better inform practice by accounting for variation in the effectiveness of different techniques across stages of adoption.
鼓励农业土地所有者采用保护措施对于增强私人拥有的农田景观中的生态系统服务至关重要。为了提高与土地所有者的互动并增加采用率，许多研究致力于调查不同的心理、社会、经济和政治因素与采用之间的相关性。然而，这些研究在很大程度上将采用视为离散的二元事件。这样做掩盖了土地所有者决策和参与技术的序列，这些技术是保护工作者用来鼓励土地所有者在采用过程中取得进展的。我们报告了两项研究，它们为农业保护实践采用过程的新兴文献以及整个过程中参与技术的不同有效性做出了贡献。首先，对美国切萨皮克湾流域的保护工作者进行了访谈，得出了采用过程中不同阶段以及工作者在每个阶段发现有效的技术的初步模型。其次，一项在线实验研究了可视化干预在采用过程中的两个连续结果中的有效性，以获取更多信息并与从业者联系。我们的结果表明，从业者使用了各种各样的参与技术，其中大多数技术是采用过程中单个阶段特有的，并且可视化技术的有效性在不同阶段之间有很大差异。这些研究共同概述了一套技术，其他从业者可能会在采用过程的不同阶段发现这些技术有效，并表明研究可以通过考虑不同技术在采用阶段的有效性变化更好地为实践提供信息。
