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Graduate Exit Seminar - Missie Stanger

Plan to join Missie Stanger's graduate exit seminar on April 13, 2022, at 1:00 p.m. in Kottman Hall 333c. Missie will present, "Bobcat and coyote management scenarios: evaluating the management preferences of individuals across an urban-to-rural residency gradient."

Abstract:
The variation in infrastructure and human population density in urban, suburban, and rural landscapes provide a vastly different living environment for both humans and wildlife, which in turn can impact the relationship humans have with wildlife in these areas. This may also in turn impact the public’s preferences for how human-carnivore conflicts should be handled in these areas. We conducted a cross-sectional survey with two variations to assess the predator control preferences of urban, suburban, and rural residents when given hypothetical management scenarios that did not include human injury or an explicit danger to human safety: one variation of the survey was given to United States residents and contained scenarios depicting coyote (Canis latrans) interactions, and the other variation of the survey was given to Ohio residents and contained scenarios depicting interactions with bobcats (Lynx rufus). We created a measure for urban, suburban, and rural respondent residency that included both childhood and current residency to capture the effect of residential experience. The primary purpose of this research was to understand which factors are useful for explaining individuals' predator control preferences. Research on patterns of response may be particularly useful for identifying how changes in context (e.g., location settings and severity of encounters) affect the extent to which preferences are malleable. Binomial logistic regression was used to determine the factors that predicted the likelihood of respondents changing their predator control preference; that is, we sought to understand which factors led people to respond to multiple scenarios with the same control preference (rigidity) or different control preferences (flexibility). Additionally, we used multinomial logistic regression to determine the significance of various cognitive and demographic factors in explaining the odds of an individual’s preferences for monitoring, hazing, or lethal control across multiple scenarios.

Advisor: Dr. Jeremy Bruskotter