Marc J. Stern

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Verified

Marc verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Virginia Tech

The resilience of natural resource management (NRM) institutions are largely contingent on the capacities of the people and organizations within those institutions to learn, innovate, and adapt, both individually and collectively. These capacities may be powerfully constrained or catalyzed by the nature of the relationships between the various enti...

Despite the long-recognized importance of trust in the natural resources manage-ment literature, few have drawn upon the breadth of other disciplines' investigations of trust to inform their work. This article represents an effort to break down the concept of trust into its component parts in an attempt to reorganize trust theory in a robust and pr...

Natural resource planning processes on public lands in the United States are driven in large part by the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which dictates general processes for analyzing and disclosing the likely impacts of proposed actions. The outcomes of these processes are the result of multiple factors, many related...

We conducted a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed research studies published between 1999 and 2010 that empirically evaluated the outcomes of environmental education (EE) programs for youth (ages 18 and younger) in an attempt to address the following objectives: (1) to seek reported empirical evidence for what works (or does not) in EE p...

We have undertaken empirical research to explore relationships between the stock of various capitals and the resilience of conservation area management committees (CAMCs)—the functional decision-making units of community-based conservation—within the Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal. We surveyed 190 members of 30 CAMCs during the summer of 2007,...

Local participation has been greatly promoted to accomplish conservation and development goals globally, but the participation paradox, in which those empowered to participate fail to do so, has rarely been thoroughly scrutinized. Here we test the participation paradox with empirical data of 234 local decision‐makers' participation in a decision‐ma...

Theoretically strategic planning improves management activities, employee motivations, and ultimately, organizational performance. Comprehensive interpretive planning, a form of strategic planning, also should theoretically assists organizations that provide interpretive services by identifying audiences, key stories, interpretive themes, and goals...

One of the biggest challenges environmental education (EE) practitioners face is having timely and systematically-collected evaluation data to inform the design and improvement of existing programs. One potential way to provide systematic evaluations of programs and build evaluation capacity for practitioners is through a facilitated community of p...

Community efforts to consider climate change within local planning processes are increasingly common. Place-based climate adaptation workshops are commonly employed tools within these larger processes. The research, to date, on these phenomena has yielded mixed results, and the empirical evidence regarding what makes these workshops more or less ef...

Do more natural settings improve students’ learning? We collected surveys immediately following 283 U.S.-based environmental education (EE) field trip programs for youth and used land cover data to examine the relationship between levels of naturalness, defined as the percentage of natural land cover of the EE field trip site, and student learning...

Which approaches are associated with better student learning outcomes in environmental education (EE)? We observed a sample of 299 day-long EE field trip programs occurring across the U.S.A. for youth in grades 5–8 (ages 9 to 14). We tracked the extent of use and quality of implementation of 66 programmatic, educator, and setting characteristics an...

North American fish and wildlife management has long been supported by the financial contributions of anglers and hunters to state fish and wildlife agencies; however, stagnation in angling participation and declines in hunting participation threaten the stability of this user‐pay support system. While engaging recreationists beyond those with cons...

Joint professional and stakeholder meetings to share local, regional and national responses to the current and projected effects of climate change have become regular, recurring events over the past decade. These “climate adaptation convenings” generally include presentations, discussions, and social learning about how to effectively respond to cli...

Evaluation has not been used to its fullest potential in environmental education (EE). Pressures from external stakeholders can cause organizations to focus on reporting requirements at the expense of conducting evaluations that support programmatic improvement. Understanding practitioners’ satisfaction with their evaluation processes and the drive...

We explored the relationship between the fulfillment of students’ psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness; student engagement; and student outcomes related to environmental literacy at a residential environmental education (EE) center. We surveyed diverse groups of middle school students (N = 1,278) following the completion of...

Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have changed the social and political landscape in which environmental educators work. To meet these challenges and to assess current training needs, we invited members of three national U.S. organizations to rate 28 different professional competencies in terms of importance and preparedness to perform....

The drivers of individual landowners’ adoption of conservation easements have been well-studied. However, the role and relative predictive power of drivers at the community, rather than individual, scale have not. This study employs diffusion of innovations theory to examine easement adoption in Virginia at the community scale, using geospatial ana...

In this case study, we used a mixed-methods approach to identify the characteristics of environmental education (EE) lessons most positively associated with students’ environmental literacy outcomes at one residential EE center in the U.S. Students attending residential EE programs spend multiple days participating in numerous lessons, activities,...

Despite the many challenges inherent in conducting high-quality evaluations in the field of environmental education (EE), there is a growing recognition of the importance of evaluation, not only to gauge program success, but also to use evaluation results to improve programming, support organizational learning, and ensure programs are meeting the n...

Many environmental educators shifted to online programs in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify program characteristics from digital environmental education experiences that are associated with one or more elements of environ- mental literacy. After reviewing 153 candidate articles, 32 articles...

Outdoor recreation is a type of recreation that occurs in, and depends on, the natural environment. Ecosystem services are the benefits people receive from ecosystems. The outdoor recreation research (ORR) field has developed a detailed understanding of the recreation experience but has not developed a full understanding of the contribution of the...

Decades of research confirm that interpretation and environmental education on public lands can accomplish a wide variety of positive outcomes for participants, ranging from personal learning and growth to stewardship behaviors both onand off-site. This research note offers a brief summary of the state-of-the-field of interpretation and environment...

As global change increases the frequency and severity of drinking water threats, managers work toward building resilient water systems to adapt to these disturbances. A critical component of resilience is citizen trust in their water utilities. Trust in an institution is a function of individual's calculation of their water utility's capability and...

Despite growing calls for greater inclusivity and cultural responsiveness, little is known about how environmental education (EE) may differentially affect diverse audiences. As part of a national study of 334 environmentally focused day field trips for adolescent youth in the United States in 2018, we examined how outcomes differed for students of...

Positive motivation to perform work tasks has been associated with better performance and outcomes in both the organizational and informal education literature. In environmental education (EE), this means that more motivated instructors are likely to provide better programs for their participants. In this exploratory study across 15 states in the U...

Highlights • Nonformal environmental education is broadly distributed in urban settings. • The diverse social roles of urbanites create rich learningscapes for environmental learning. • Successful urban nonformal environmental education involves relating environmental content to the everyday lives of urban learners, ensuring learner autonomy, and i...

We reviewed all manuscripts published within the Journal of Interpretation Research from 2010 to 2019 to identify lessons learned from the past decade and to propose future directions to advance the field. The last decade of the Journal featured a wide diversity of studies, including evaluations of interpretive programs and trainings, examinations...

Conservation practitioners regularly engage in partnerships and processes to develop and achieve important conservation goals aimed at alleviating the biodiversity crisis. These processes, and the partnerships needed for success, are subject to complex social dynamics that can result in negative outcomes if not well understood and addressed. As an...

Using the theoretical lens of Interaction Ritual Chains theory, the study investigates how transformative tourism narratives are symbolized by transformed tourists. Transformative tourism focuses on pushing tourists out of their comfort zone, encouraging inclusive worldviews, promoting cross-cultural understanding and social empowerment. A creative...

The limited application of science to environmental management has been termed the “science‐management knowledge gap.” This gap is widely assumed to be a consequence of inefficient knowledge transfer from science to application. However, this metaphor misrepresents knowledge as a “thing” that can be readily exchanged in complex systems, rather than...

Quantification of empirical relationships between ecosystem health and human well-being is uncommon at broad spatial scales. We used public data for Virginia (USA) counties to examine pairwise correlations among two indicators of stream health, thirteen indicators of human well-being, and four demographic metrics. Our indicators of stream health in...

Abstract Within forest planning and management, collaboration has becoming increasingly widespread. Many collaborative projects take place over long time periods, and thus personnel turnover is inevitable within these groups. Scholars from the fields of business and organizational science have long studied strategies that organizations can use to p...

Environmental education (EE) aims to create environmentally literate individuals that have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to solve important environmental issues. However, little research examines whether and which educator’s emotional support behaviors, such as responsiveness and positive communications, enhance outcomes in an EE program....

Studies of individual environmental education (EE) field trip programs have found that pre-visit preparation and post-visit follow-up activities can enhance desired student outcomes. We examined these relationships across a broad sample of single-day EE field trip programs for adolescent youth (grades 5-8) across the United States. We measured stud...

Drawing on results from a recent national study, we draw attention to the importance of the experiential learning cycle for enhancing meaningful outcomes of interpretive and educational experiences. The experiential learning cycle involves participating in a concrete experience, reflecting on that experience, drawing out lessons learned and princip...

Environmental education (EE) typically occurs in natural settings, which research suggests may enhance learning outcomes. Although field trips are commonly used to teach EE, few studies have isolated the influence of different setting characteristics for enhancing participant outcomes during an EE field trip. According to the literature, certain at...

In this study, we explore the influence of student engagement on middle school students’ environmental literacy outcomes at a residential environmental education (EE) program. We observed 80 lessons and 17 educators, observing six measures related to engagement. We also administered immediate post-experience surveys measuring students’ self-reporte...

Divisions between political Liberals and Conservatives on environmental issues seem to be widening, with Liberals generally more pro-environmental than Conservatives. We propose that common framing of environmental messages tends to perpetuate these gaps. We designed two experiments to examine this assumption and explore the prospects of narrowing...

The natural resource management literature documents many reasons for pursuing collaborative processes, offering useful insights on how to manage conflict and facilitate productive deliberation in complex multistakeholder collaborative efforts. Moral foundations theory and self‐affirmation theory can further help collaborative efforts mitigate conf...

In the last century, mobile pastoralists around the world have transitioned to more sedentary lifestyles. Traditionally mobile people can be both pushed to settle by environmental or political forces, and pulled by new economic activities. While researchers have examined the causes and consequences of growing sedentarization, few contemporary studi...

While multiple valid measures exist for assessing outcomes of environmental education (EE) programs, the field lacks a comprehensive and logistically feasible common instrument that can apply across diverse programs. We describe a participatory effort for identifying and developing crosscutting outcomes for Environmental Education in the twenty-fir...

This paper investigates how self-described transformative tourism practitioners engage with tourists and local stakeholders to provide what they perceive as a transformative experience for tourists via the use of glocalization strategies. Transformative tourism practitioners are constantly in search of nimble and sophisticated processes that acknow...

Social-ecological challenges call for a far better integration of the social sciences into conservation training and practice. Environmental problems are, first and foremost, people problems. Without better understandings of the people involved, solutions are often hard to come by, regardless of expertise in biology, ecology, or other traditional c...

In this study, we examine the nature of scientific discourse among participants enrolled in two citizen science projects as they engage in collaborative modeling and problem solving. Specifically, we explore the nature of their conversation as they use, the Mental Modeler, an online collaborative modeling tool to facilitate science engagement, syst...

Successful natural resource management increasingly requires collaboration across boundaries and between diverse stakeholder groups, and trust is a key ingredient of successful collaboration. This study represents an early qualitative empirical attempt to understand how different forms of trust develop, function, and interact in collaborative natur...

This study explores the motivations and barriers for participation and persistence in an innovative citizen science pilot project with Virginia Master Naturalist volunteers. The project combines self-guided online training, in-person meetings, and collaboration through social networking and “mental modeling” to support on-the-ground development and...

Understanding the development of pro-environmental behavioral intentions and behaviors remains one of the greatest challenges for environmental educators worldwide. Using the Elaboration Likelihood Model as a theoretical foundation, we developed surveys to evaluate the influence of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Junior Ranger program on yo...

This chapter explores the relationship between urban environmental education programs and urban environmental governance in light of the “deliberative turn”—a shift away from “government” toward “governance,” including in urban planning and policy making, and the acceptance of stakeholder participation and dialogue as crucial elements in governance...

This chapter examines the pedagogy of nonformal environmental education for urban audiences, focusing on different types of urban nonformal educational opportunities and situating them in the lives of urbanites using the concept of “learningscapes.” Urban nonformal environmental education involves relating environmental content to the everyday live...

This book explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are...

Collaboration is a growing trend in agency-led natural resource management in the USA, carrying the promise of defusing conflict and incorporating a broader range of stakeholder ideas. However, concerns exist that confrontational or litigious groups may use collaborative forums to their organization's own advantage. We conducted case studies on thr...

Role models may be essential in helping students develop environmental literacy and characteristics associated with positive youth development (PYD). We examine the identities of middle school students’ self-reported role models before, immediately after, and three months following an immersive 5-day residential environmental education (EE) experie...

Collaborative forest management efforts often encounter challenges related to process and stakeholder relationships. To address these challenges, groups may employ the services of coordinators and facilitators who perform a range of tasks in support of the collaborative. We sought to understand differences between facilitation and coordination in t...

Nature centers can serve as valuable community institutions if they are seen as providing important services to the community. Through survey research in communities surrounding 16 nature centers in the United States, we examine the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that drive hypothetical support for nature centers from local residents. Respondent...

While nature center’s missions often point to connecting people to nature in various ways, their potential to provide a broader array of services to their communities remains largely unexplored. To better understand the values local community members hold for nature centers, we conducted survey research around 16 centers in the United States. Explo...

Successfully engaging target audiences represents a key challenge for environmental conservation projects. In this study, we examined 354 conservation projects implemented across the United States with the intention of systematically exploring the relationships between different forms of outreach (in particular, message content and delivery) and se...

This investigation examines the development of two scales that measure elaboration and behaviors associated with stewardship in children. The scales were developed using confirmatory factor analysis to investigate their construct validity, reliability, and psychometric properties. Results suggest that a second-order factor model structure provides...

We examined key drivers of deforestation in the Lake Victoria Crescent, Uganda from 1989 to 2009 through a case study approach with a multiple-case design. Nineteen focus groups with local community members and forest officials, archival analysis, and field observation revealed both proximate causes and underlying drivers of deforestation. Proximat...

Individuals and public groups generally participate in public involvement events in an effort to gain influence over decisions that affect them. However, not much is known about how the process actually results in the public gaining influence over agency decisions. This paper reports the results of an online survey completed by 489 Forest Service N...

The Forest Service is mandated to involve the public during agency planning efforts, but involving the public does not necessarily mean the public will gain any influence over the planning decision. An earlier survey revealed that Forest Service team leaders commonly desire greater levels of public influence than they achieve in their planning proc...

Based on data from 272 live interpretive programs conducted across 24 units of the U.S. National Park Service, we investigate the influence of context upon interpretive programs and visitor outcomes. We first examined whether outcomes vary based upon the size of the audience and its age makeup; program characteristics such as duration, topic, and t...

We conducted a study to empirically isolate the factors that are most consistently linked with positive outcomes for the attendees of live interpretive programs. We examined the relationships between interpreter and program characteristics and three visitor outcomes—visitor satisfaction, visitor experience and appreciation, and intentions to change...

This study modeled the relative influence of program characteristics and interpreter attributes on three visitor outcomes (satisfaction, visitor experience and appreciation, and behavioral intentions) using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The three resulting models accounted for between 10% and 27% (R ² ) of the variance in the outcomes. The mo...

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate in both a quantitative and qualitative sense the practices that distinguish great interpretive programs from those that may merely be adequate to satisfy the visitor's basic desires to learn, be entertained, or spend time with a ranger. Great programs, like great works of art, have the potential to impact...

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires U.S. Forest Service planning processes to be conducted by interdisciplinary teams of resource specialists to analyze and disclose the likely environmental impacts of proposed natural resource management actions on Forest Service lands. Multiple challenges associated with these processes have bee...

We conducted a study to empirically isolate the factors that are most consistently linked with positive outcomes for the attendees of live interpretive programs. We examined the relationships between interpreter and program characteristics and three visitor outcomes—visitor satisfaction, visitor experience and appreciation, and intentions to change...

Ecotourism has become a valuable industry in developing countries with a promise of reconciling nature conservation and economic development goals. A sample of 315 international visitors to the Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA), Nepal was surveyed in April and May of 2006 to assess how they gathered information, evaluated ecotourism and rated their...

In its recent history, the U.S. Forest Service is among many federal land management agencies struggling with questions concerning why its planning procedures are sometimes inefficient, perform poorly in the eyes of the public, and fail to deliver outputs that advance agency mission. By examining a representative sample of National Environmental Po...

Since Freeman Tilden defined interpretation, numerous authors have proposed methodological best practices. The purposes of this meta-analysis were to identify best practices and examine the empirical evidence linking them to visitor outcomes. We identified 17 best practices from key texts used for interpretive training. Our investigation examined t...