Search for: All records

Introduction: Large-scale investments in restoring California’s forested watersheds are imperative for conserving biodiversity, enhancing water quality, and mitigating the future impacts of climate change. This study explores the underlying incentives, major challenges, and potential strategies associated with such investments. Methods: An online survey was administered to 43 experts in the field to gather their insights on forest watershed restoration investments. The collected responses were then analyzed using a combination of confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis to elucidate patterns and relationships. Results: The analysis revealed that key environmental outcomes, such as reducing wildfire risks and protecting water supplies, are the principal motivators driving investment. At the same time, significant barriers emerged, including high costs, limited workforce capacity, and insufficient trust among stakeholders. The study also identified a series of effective strategies to overcome these obstacles, such as repositioning forest restoration as an infrastructure investment and clearly demonstrating its ecological, social, and economic benefits. Discussion: Overall, the findings underscore the need for more flexible funding frameworks, enhanced stakeholder engagement, and improved data infrastructures. By addressing these elements, policymakers and practitioners can pave the way for more resilient and sustainable forested-watershed ecosystems in California. 

The social impacts of natural resource management are challenging to evaluate because their perceived benefits and costs vary across stakeholder groups. Nevertheless, ensuring social acceptance is essential to building public support for adaptive measures required for the sustainable management of ecosystems in a warming climate. Based on surveys with both members of the public and natural-resource professionals in California, we applied structural-equation modeling to examine how psychological factors impact individuals' attitudes toward management's capacity to reduce the impacts of disturbance events, including wildfires, smoke from wildfires, drought, water shortages, tree mortality, and utility failure. We found the members of the public more optimistic than natural-resource professionals, perceiving management capacity to be on average 3.04 points higher (of 10) and displaying higher levels of trust of the government on both the state (Δ = 11%) and federal levels (Δ = 19%). Personal experience with natural-resource events had a positive effect on perceived management in both the public (1.26) and the professional samples (5.05), whereas perceived future risk had a negative effect within both samples (professional = −0.91, public = −0.45). In addition, higher trust and perceived management effectiveness were also linked with higher perceptions of management capacity in the public sample (1.81 versus 1.24), which could affect the acceptance of management actions. Continued social acceptance in a period of increasing risk may depend on managers sharing personal experiences and risk perception when communicating with the public. The contemporary shift toward multibenefit aims is an important part of that message.