Michelle L. Lute

Project Coyote

Who has knowledge and how it is communicated between groups can help determine who has power in wildlife management. Despite a trend toward more transactional processes that purposefully incorporate stakeholder knowledge, technical and science-based information remain dominant inputs for wildlife governance in the United States and elsewhere. Thus,...

Post-recovery wolf management remains controversial. In Michigan, dialogue centers on hunting wolves but controversy may be more nuanced than simple pro- or anti-hunting positions. Social identity may cause stakeholders to organize in groups and identity differences may be driving controversy. To explore stakeholder disagreement over wolf managemen...

Corruption affects biodiversity conservation. Mechanisms that more effectively reform corruption and mitigate negative effects of corruption on conservation are needed, especially in biodiversity hotspots such as Madagascar. Local defi-nitions of corrupt behavior, attitudes about reforms, and motivations for non-compliance may generate deeper under...

The importance of private lands conservation (PLC) for endangered species continues to grow as habitat is increasingly lost or fragmented. In Texas, nearly 98% of all property is privately owned, rendering PLC critical for protecting endangered species. Despite case studies regarding factors leading to stewardship outcomes for endangered species, a...

Achieving human-carnivore coexistence is a growing challenge in an increasingly crowded world. In many cases, humans are already sharing landscapes with carnivores, but conditions promoting coexistence are not well understood. Coyotes (Canis latrans) are adaptable meso carnivores and their activities increasingly overlap with those of humans in urb...

Survey dataset for Modeling urban socio-ecological drivers of human-carnivore coexistence

Decision-making about large carnivores is complex and controversial, and processes vary from deliberation and expert analysis to ballot boxes and courtrooms. Decision-makers range from neighboring landowners to the United Nations. Efficacy, longevity and legitimacy of policies may often depend as much on process as the policy itself. Overcoming con...

Human-carnivore coexistence is an oft-stated goal but assumptions about what constitutes coexistence can lead to goal misalignment and undermine policy and program efficacy. Questions about how to define coexistence remain and specific goals and methods for reaching coexistence require refining. Co-adaptation, where humans adapt to carnivores and v...

The legitimacy of large carnivore institutions to exercise truth-making power is assumed by constituents and other audiences. This study examines the power of language in shaping resistance to hegemonic truths about red wolf recovery in North Carolina. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of seven corpora produced by a discourse coalition com...

Although many studies explore characteristics of stakeholders or publics "for" or "against" large carnivores, disagreements among conservation professionals advocating different conservation strategies also occur, but are not well recognized. Differing viewpoints on whether and how humans can share landscapes with large carni-vores can influence co...

ABSTRACT Efforts to reverse declines in native grasslands benefit from agricultural policies that encourage private land conservation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) improved conservation across landscapes but enrollment has declined. We used sequential exploratory mixed methods to compare landowner and cons...

Efforts to reverse declines in native grasslands benefit from agricultural policies that encourage private land conservation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) improved conservation across landscapes but enrollment has declined. We used sequential exploratory mixed methods to compare landowner and conservation...

Efforts to reverse declines in native grasslands benefit from agricultural policies that encourage private land conservation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) improved conservation across landscapes but enrollment has declined. We used sequential exploratory mixed methods to compare landowner and conservation...

Despite increasing support for conservation efforts, humans exert strong negative forces on nature and disagree over management of these effects. Conflicts over conservation policy may reflect evolving opinions about how people ought to conserve species and whether to intervene in various processes. To understand public preferences for conservation...

We performed a formal content analysis on a sample of public comments collected via email by Isle Royale National Park between September of 2012 and April of 2014 regarding the precipitous decline in wolf abundance on the island; the resulting threat to the wolf/moose, predator/prey system; and the possibility of intervention. Public comments were...

We propose two contrasting types of student decision-making based on social and cognitive psychology models of separate mental processes for problem solving. Informal decision-making uses intuitive reasoning and is subject to cognitive biases, whereas formal decision-making uses effortful, logical reasoning. We explored indicators of students’ form...

Environmental insecurity is a source and outcome of biodiversity declines and social conflict. One challenge to scaling insecurity reduction policies is that empirical evidence about local attitudes is overwhelmingly missing. We set three objectives: determine how local people rank risk associated with different sources of environmental insecurity;...

Despite increasing support for conservation globally, controversy over specific conservation policies persists among diverse stakeholders. Investigating the links between morals in relation to conservation can help increase understanding about why humans support or oppose policy, especially related to human-wildlife conflict or human conflict over...

Whereas past wolf management in the United States was restricted to recovery, managers must now contend with publicly contentious post-recovery issues including regulated hunting seasons. Understanding stakeholder concerns associated with hunting can inform stakeholder engagement, communication, and policy development and evaluation. Social identit...

Encouraging sustainable water use is a critical endeavor in addressing issues associated with short- and long-term droughts. Toilets account for up to 26.7% of indoor household water use. Therefore substantial opportunity exists to conserve water via reduced flushing after urination at home. Here, we use an online survey (N = 1008) to identify barr...

Encouraging sustainable water use is a critical endeavor in addressing issues associated with short- and long-term droughts. Toilets account for up to 26.7% of indoor household water use. Therefore substantial opportunity exists to conserve water via reduced flushing after urination at home. Here, we use an online survey (N = 1008) to identify barr...

Encouraging sustainable water use is a critical endeavor in addressing issues associated with short- and long-term droughts. Toilets account for up to 26.7% of indoor household water use. Therefore substantial opportunity exists to conserve water via reduced flushing after urination at home. Here, we use an online survey (N = 1008) to identify barr...

Whereas past wolf management in the United States was restricted to recovery, managers must now contend with publicly contentious post-recovery issues including regulated hunting seasons. Understanding stakeholder concerns associated with hunting can inform stakeholder engagement, communication, and policy development and evaluation. Social identit...

Corruption affects biodiversity conservation. Mechanisms that more effectively reform corruption and mitigate negative effects of corruption on conservation are needed, especially in biodiversity hotspots such as Madagascar. Local definitions of corrupt behavior, attitudes about reforms, and motivations for noncompliance may generate deeper underst...

Aggression and peripheralization between adult and subadult male macaques have been postulated as proximate causes for dispersal, but empirical evidence for this relationship is scarce. To investigate the level of aggression and peripheralization experienced by subadult males, we conducted focal animal and scan sampling of two long-tailed macaque (...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Whereas in the past wolf management in Michigan was restricted to recovery, today, managers must contend with range expansion and post-recovery issues including policy changes (e.g., federal delisting, regulated hunting seasons); public responses to policy change (e.g., lawsuits, public votes, media coverage, poaching); and balanc...

Bali’s unique religious tradition established the foundations of a system of island-wide rice agriculture that is organized around interconnected water temples, known as subaks (Lansing 2007). This temple-oriented rice agricultural system was well established at the time of the Dutch Colonization of Indonesia, approximately 500 years ago, and has r...