Factors influencing private woodland owners’ land management decisions on Lyme disease mitigation in Maine

Abstract

Tick-borne diseases (TBDs), including Lyme disease (LD), have become of great concern in the United States due to their impacts on individuals, communities, local businesses, and the national economy. Methods to mitigate the impact of TBDs often target tick habitat and wildlife hosts, yet the effectiveness of these methods is contingent on large-scale adoption by private woodland owners (PWOs) and agencies. As research has shown, adaptive land management methods may have a significative impact on LD mitigation in forest landscapes. Therefore, understanding how PWOs’ current and future decisions on land management methods may contribute to reducing human exposure to TBDs is critical. In this paper we characterize the factors influencing PWOs’ land management decisions and develop an improved understanding of their perception of LD as it relates to land management. We synthesize this information by identifying opportunities for and barriers against the adoption of adaptive land management methods among PWOs. We applied a quantitative survey to 355 PWOs from the state of Maine in fall of 2019 and spring of 2020. Our analysis sought to explore the relationships between PWOs’ individual characteristics and histories, and their knowledge, experience, perceptions, attitudes and sources of information regarding ticks and LD. Our findings show that the diversity of PWOs’ attitudes, perceptions of, and land management objectives requires to be approached in tandem. PWOs’ orientations toward LD management methods are significantly associated with several socio-demographic and land-ownership characteristics, such as gender, education background, size of woodlot and frequency of engagement in land management, supporting the inclusion of demographic data in future PWO behavior research. In this paper we discuss how sociodemographic characteristics alongside PWOs’ attitudes, perceptions of and land management objectives can be considered by agencies interested in promoting land management methods through targeted outreach and educational campaigns.