Wayde Morse

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Auburn University

Successful management of invasive species often requires working across public and private landownerships. A prime example of an invasive species that commonly occurs on privately and publicly owned and managed lands is the wild pig (Sus scrofa). Because of the multitude of negative impacts associated with wild pigs, management must occur across bo...

This article presents a mini review of systems and resilience approaches to tourism analysis and to protected area management, and of how the Social-Ecological Complex Adaptive Systems (SECAS) framework can help link them together. SECAS is a unique framework that integrates social theories (structuration) and ecological theories (hierarchical patc...

Parks and protected areas have long been promoted for their environmental conservation benefits, opportunities for outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism, and associated economic opportunities. However, conservation biologists and ecologists are increasingly embracing the idea that achieving their conservation goals requires working outside th...

The goal of this special issue is to contribute to the development of frameworks and tools to facilitate the sustainable management of outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism as social-ecological complex adaptive systems addressed at multiple scales and fully integrated across disciplines.

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...

Recreation opportunities exist as a system at multiple scales and are offered by a variety of recreation providers sometimes with different goals and objectives. Incremental and disparate planning across providers can lead to mismatched supply and demand and inefficient use of resources. Furthermore, traditional recreation supply and demand studies...

Recreation ecology has its foundations in the premise that recreationists have a negative impact on ecosystems, and are thus treated as an ecological stressor. However, ecology is the study of interactions between organisms and the environment, not just an organism's impacts on the environment. While we do not dispute the evidence that recreationis...

Participation in hunting has been declining and organizations have increased efforts to recruit non-traditional path hunters (NTPHs) such as adults who did not hunt as children, urban residents, and women. Anecdotal evidence suggests that NTPHs could be interested in hunting if recruiters emphasized certain aspects of the hunting experience such as...

Wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are one of the most detrimental invasive mammals in the US. Lack of adequate population control has allowed pigs to become established across the landscape, causing significant ecological and economic damage. Given the need for additional tools for reducing wild pig populations, two toxicants, warfarin and sodium nitrite, are...

Landowners manage for multiple objectives (e.g. timber production, wildlife habitat, or as a legacy for heirs) and natural resource professionals (NRPs) are tasked with providing guidance and technical assistance. However, if a landowner is interested in silvopasture, NRPs may be of limited assistance if they are unfamiliar with what the practice e...

The U.S. Gulf of Mexico coast has a long history of intense and varied development, from energy infrastructure and seaports to vacation homes and tourism. Coastal populations and development are growing. Concurrently, global climate change will influence sea level rise, resulting in increased flooding, storm surge, and coastal erosion. Regional pla...

Effective outreach for an endangered species often requires an understanding of human dimensions information to guide pro-conservation behavior. To provide a foundation for outreach communication strategies regarding Whooping Crane conservation in Alabama, we administered surveys to local residents, waterfowl hunters, and birders. We tested a theor...

Parks and protected areas (PPAs) are facing complex, transboundary, social, and ecological pressures, including those related to visitor use. Effective visitor use management (VUM) in PPAs requires interdisciplinary thinking across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Yet, the majority of this VUM research is short-term and occurs at relatively di...

The environment and society are both the context for and product of human actions and interactions. Outdoor recreation is the primary interaction many people have with the environment and it is an interaction that greatly contributes to human well-being. To sustainably manage the social and ecological components of outdoor recreation, an integrativ...

Individuals recreate to realize desired experiences or benefits. When used for recreational planning, benefits-based management (BBM) is an approach that focuses on understanding and managing for the beneficial outcomes of recreational experiences. Outcome focused management (OFM) builds on this to understand the larger system of recreation facilit...

Obesity rates in the United States are trending upward, and disadvantaged populations continue to have disproportionate rates of obesity. In Alabama, the ALProHealth initiative used community-based participatory research to work with community coalitions to implement research-based interventions that addressed issues related to the lack of opportun...

Background: The Gulf Coast of the United States is home to mosquito vectors that may spread disease causing pathogens, and environmental conditions that are ideal for the sustained transmission of mosquito-borne pathogens. Understanding public perceptions of mosquito-borne diseases and mosquito prevention strategies is critical for the development...

Despite low numbers for the past century, black bear (Ursus americanus) populations in Alabama appear to be growing. There are often strong emotional reaction and public disagreement toward how wildlife management agencies respond to human-bear encounters. We used data from a mail in survey (n = 564) distributed to residents of two distinct regions...

Natural Resource Professionals (NRPs) are commonly regarded as the front lines of agriculture and forest management innovations, including silvopasture, an agroforestry practice. Yet, as silvopasture is a departure from more traditional land management practices, many NRPs may not have the expertise or training to help landowners make informed deci...

Coastal estuaries in the northern Gulf of Mexico are important habitat for wading birds, but are threatened by land use and ecological changes. Conservation has been demonstrated to be more effective when stakeholders are included in the decision-making process. Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) facilitates the inclusion o...

As long as the funding mechanism supporting state wildlife conservation relies heavily on hunter-generated funds, declines in hunter participation are a threat to the conservation of both game and nongame species. To address options to bolster wildlife agency profit from the sale of hunting licenses, we developed a stage-based, stochastic populatio...

Migrant labor is a global phenomenon and remittances of migrant workers from non-industrial nations can play an important role in improving quality of life at family, community, and national levels. We focus on workers from Guatemala who obtain visas from the United States (US) Department of Immigration’s H-2B program that allow them to spend six o...

With the establishment of Zika virus in the Americas, an accurate understanding of the geographic range of its primary vector, Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti (L.) (Diptera: Culicidae), is vital to assessing transmission risk. In an article published in June 2016, Hahn and colleagues compiled county-level records in the United States for the presence of...

A central component of successful wildlife conservation is the understanding of public perceptions toward a species. We administered an online survey to Alabama waterfowl hunters (n = 284) to examine differences in awareness and knowledge of and attitudes toward Whooping Cranes. We investigated if these variables and/or birding specialization influ...

Black bear populations in Alabama have been low since the early part of the 20th century, but an increase in sightings over the past decade has led researchers to believe that populations may be growing, spurring discussions on restoring the species throughout its native range in the state. The rise of a large carnivore population is likely to incr...

How we define “culture” and societal well-being related to culture depends heavily on who is looking at it, but culture can be generally described as “the customs and beliefs of a particular group of people that are used to express their collectively held values” (Soulbury Commission 2012). In the context of forests, culturally derived norms, belie...

The integrated effects of the many risk factors associated with West Nile virus (WNV) incidence are complex and not well understood. We studied an array of risk factors in and around Atlanta, GA, that have been shown to be linked with WNV in other locations. This array was comprehensive and included climate and meteorological metrics, vegetation ch...

Production of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) offers a way for landowners to generate income without harvesting timber. In Alabama, pine straw is a NTFP with strong market potential, but the market is relatively undeveloped compared to markets in some other Southeastern states. A mail survey was conducted to assess the willingness of landowners...

Two prominent critiques of volunteer tourism are that it is a top-down imposed form of development treating host communities as passive recipients of international aid, and that the impacts of volunteer tourism in host communities are not systematically evaluated. To address this we identified a pre-existing participatory methodology for assessing...

Volunteer tourism is a rapidly growing form of alternative travel and one of its central pillars consists of generating beneficial impacts in host destinations. However, few mechanisms have been proposed or developed to understand, identify or assess the impacts of volunteer tourism in host communities. One strategy to assess these impacts is by de...

In this study, we used public participation geographic information systems methods to collect spatial data identifying places that stakeholders in Mobile Bay, Alabama think are important providers of watershed services. These methods allowed us to spatially analyze participatory data from general public respondents and directly compare them with ot...

This paper explores the use of indicators to evaluate the impacts of volunteer tourism in host communities, based on an online questionnaire sent to 183 volunteer tourism organizations. Little research exists demonstrating how volunteer tourism programs impact host communities or how impacts can be assessed, but the literature suggests the use of i...

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...

Wildlife management increasingly incorporates public participation to be more inclusive and reduce tensions between management and the general public in the decision-making process. There is also a need, however, to include spatial data since most wildlife biological and biophysical data are stored spatially in geographic information systems (GIS)....

Use of public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) studies that collect local knowledge in a spatial format is increasing as a tool in natural resources management. Qualitative PPGIS studies have been conducted as individual interviews, as workshops, and in focus groups. As the number of qualitative PPGIS studies increases, so does...

The association between humans and their environments is highly interactive, with humans bound to the landscapes and landscapes subject to the actions of humans. Sense of place is a concept used to describe the relationships that exist, bonds that form, and the meanings that humans ascribe to landscapes. This article builds on previous qualitative...

Background/Question/Methods West Nile virus (WNV), the most widespread arboviral pathogen in the US, is associated with urban environments in the South-Eastern US. Potential drivers of this association (land-use land-cover, socio-economic characteristics, and larval habitat availability and quality) vary across the rural-urban gradient, as well a...

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...

The environment is both a setting for and a product of human interactions. Understanding the dynamic nature of human-environment interactions is critical for mitigating the impacts of human induced environmental change and understanding how the environment shapes social systems. Current research has focused on the reduced ability of many natural sy...

We use the widespread public reaction to the recent poisoning of Auburn University's Toomer's Oaks as a poignant reminder that we sometimes, perhaps often, form deeply personal and important attachments to things such as trees. Whether derived from shared cultural experiences or unshared personal experiences, these attachments have valuable meaning...

As human–black bear conflicts increase, developing conflict mitigation strategies that account for both biological and social understanding has become a primary objective of managers. We examined black bear habitat use in the Florida Panhandle to understand its impact on the spatial distribution of conflicts. Focus groups were conducted with local...

Pine straw is a popular landscape mulch material used by landowners and homeowners throughout the southeastern United States. Pine straw is collected, transported, and sold through an informal network of landowners, harvesters, forest labor contractors, and dealers. Quality varies widely, depending on factors such as species of pines, land manageme...

A key factor determining the potential for development of cellulosic bioenergy in the southeastern United States (the South) will be the availability of feedstock, which in turn depends on landowner willingness to direct timber production to biomass rather than existing markets or nonmarket uses. Most timberland in this region is owned by family fo...

A key factor determining the potential for development of cellulosic bioenergy in the southeastern United States (the South) will be the availability of feedstock, which in turn depends on landowner willingness to direct timber production to biomass rather than existing markets or nonmarket uses. Most timberland in this region is owned by family fo...

Along the Cheoah River in western North Carolina is found one of the highest regional concentrations of the plant Virginia spiraea (Spiraea virginiana Britton). This plant is federally listed as threatened, making it a priority for conservation. It is threatened by nonnative invasive species such as kudzu (Pueraria montana (Lour.) Merr.) and privet...

Using the Environmental Scorecard ratings of Congressmen and Senators published annually by the League of Conservation Voters, we explore empirically whether political support for pro-environment legislation, aggregated across each legislative body, is sensitive over time to changing economic conditions -- that is, whether there is a political trad...

This is smaller version of the SECAS model originally developed for my dissertation and full presented in: Morse, W. C., McLaughlin, B., Wulfhorst, J. D., and C. Harvey (2013). Social ecological complex adaptive systems: A framework for research on payments for ecosystem services. Urban Ecosystems, 16, 53-77.

Background/Question/Methods The environment is both a setting for and a product of human interactions. This is particularly evident in urban systems, but relevant across the spectrum of developed and natural areas. Research on environmental change indicates that the decline in the ability of many ecosystems to provide environmental services has si...

"Compensation to landowners for forest-derived environmental services has gained international recognition as a mechanism to combat forest loss and fragmentation. This approach is widely promoted, although there is little evidence demonstrating that environmental service payments encourage forest stewardship and conservation. Costa Rica provides a...

In this article, we examine how issues of scale affect the integration of recreation management with the management of other natural resources on public lands. We present two theories used to address scale issues in ecology and explore how they can improve the two most widely applied recreation-planning frameworks. The theory of patch dynamics and...

A short version of the SECAS model for in-class reading. Morse, W.C. (2007). Linking social and ecological systems: A theoretical perspective. Ed. D.N. Laband. Emerging issues along urban-rural interfaces II: Linking land-use science and society, conference proceeding, Auburn, AL, 246-250.

The original version of the SECAS model with a much longer and more detailed case study of PES in Costa Rica. Morse, W. C. (2007). Chapter 2: Social Ecological Structuration. In: Payments for environmental services in Costa Rica: Conservation and production decisions within the San Juan – La Selva Biological Corridor. Dissertation. University of...

Integrated research across disciplines is required to address many of the pressing environmental problems facing human societies. Often the integration involves disparate disciplines, including those in the biological sciences, and demands collaboration from problem formulation through hypothesis development, data analysis, interpretation, and appl...

International educational experiences have the ability to promote cultural understanding, cooperation and interaction with global society. In a period of reduced financial and administrative resources it is more difficult to promote these experiences. Auburn University (AU) and the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences (SFWS) has partnered with...