Microtargeting for conservation |
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Authors: | Alexander L Metcalf Conor N Phelan Cassandra Pallai Michael Norton Ben Yuhas James C Finley Allyson Muth |
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Institution: | 1. W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation, University of Montana, 440 CHCB, 32 Campus Drive, Missoula, MT, 59812 U.S.A.;2. Chesapeake Conservancy, 716 Giddings Avenue, Annapolis, MD, 21403 U.S.A.;3. Yuhas Consulting Group, LLC, 121 Hawthorne Road, Baltimore, MD, 21210 U.S.A.;4. Ecosystem Science and Management, The Center for Private Forests Pennsylvania State University, Penn State 333 Forest Resources Building, University Park, PA, 16802 U.S.A. |
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Abstract: | Widespread human action and behavior change is needed to achieve many conservation goals. Doing so at the requisite scale and pace will require the efficient delivery of outreach campaigns. Conservation gains will be greatest when efforts are directed toward places of high conservation value (or need) and tailored to critical actors. Recent strategic conservation planning has relied primarily on spatial assessments of biophysical attributes, largely ignoring the human dimensions. Elsewhere, marketers, political campaigns, and others use microtargeting—predictive analytics of big data—to identify people most likely to respond positively to particular messages or interventions. Conservationists have not yet widely capitalized on these techniques. To investigate the effectiveness of microtargeting to improve conservation, we developed a propensity model to predict restoration behavior among 203,645 private landowners in a 5,200,000 ha study area in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (U.S.A.). To isolate the additional value microtargeting may offer beyond geospatial prioritization, we analyzed a new high-resolution land-cover data set and cadastral data to identify private owners of riparian areas needing restoration. Subsequently, we developed and evaluated a restoration propensity model based on a database of landowners who had conducted restoration in the past and those who had not (n = 4978). Model validation in a parallel database (n = 4989) showed owners with the highest scorers for propensity to conduct restoration (i.e., top decile) were over twice as likely as average landowners to have conducted restoration (135%). These results demonstrate that microtargeting techniques can dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of conservation programs, above and beyond the advances offered by biophysical prioritizations alone, as well as facilitate more robust research of many social–ecological systems. |
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Keywords: | conservation marketing land-use planning private lands resource allocation return on investment spatial planning systematic conservation planning triage asignación de recursos mercadotecnia de la conservación planeación espacial planeación sistemática de la conservación planeación del uso de suelo protocolo de intervención retorno de la inversión tierras privadas 保护营销学 土地利用规划 私有土地 资源分配 投资收益 空间规划 系统保护规划 优先等级分类 |
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