Abstract
Social, cultural, and economic differences have been shown to influence ecological knowledge. Given the importance of ecological knowledge for appreciation and protection of nature, we sought to investigate the relationship between landowners’ sociodemographic attributes and the number of birds listed by landowners on their property across a rural-to-urban gradient. We hypothesized that: (1) age and education would be positively related to the number of birds an individual listed, while gender would be unrelated to the number of birds an individual listed; (2) rural landowners would list a larger number of bird species due to their increased level of exposure to nature and place-based knowledge; and (3) the number of years spent living on a property would positively impact the number of birds an individual listed by increasing the amount of time possible to interact with nature. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a survey of ~1700 landowners (with 59% responding) across a rural-to-urban gradient in southeastern Michigan that asked questions pertaining to age, gender, education, property size, years lived on property, and bird identification. Age, education, and years on property were positively associated with the number of birds listed by landowner. However, sociodemographic factors interacted with the rural-to-urban gradient to determine how such factors influenced landowner listing ability. For example, females listed more birds than males on suburban routes, but not on urban or rural routes. Ultimately, sociodemographic factors were indicators of a person’s ability to list bird species on their property.
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Data Availability
Data are available from the corresponding author, C.A. Lepczyk.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the staff at the Ingham, Livingston, Oakland, and Washtenaw county Equalization Offices, who allowed us access to landowner records. Keith Pardieck and Jane Fallon at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center kindly assisted with providing maps and details of BBS routes. We are grateful to Kimberly Baker, Jayson Egeler, and Mike Mascarenhas for assisting with the survey logistics and data entry. Finally, we thank Erica Fleishman and six anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript. Support for this research was provided by a US National Science Foundation CAREER award to J. Liu, a Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station grant and a Michigan State University College of Social Science Grant to J. Liu, A. Mertig, and P. Sorrano, and a US Environmental Protection Agency Science To Achieve Results (STAR) Fellowship (Grant No. U-91580101-0) to CAL.
Author Contributions
CAL conceptualized project, secured funding, collected data, and assisted in data interpretation and writing. SP, MD, and LJS carried out research and wrote draft manuscript and revisions. TDS conducted statistical analyses and revisions.
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The survey instrument and procedures were approved by the Michigan State University Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects.
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Fleck, M.S., Dinan, M., Simmons, L.J. et al. Investigating the Relationship between Sociodemographic Factors and Bird Identification by Landowners Across a Rural-to-Urban Gradient. Environmental Management 68, 65–72 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-021-01475-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-021-01475-w