Supporting Women Landowners in Wetland Conservation

Abstract

Wetlands are important to soil health and water quality improvements needed to meet conservation goals in the Upper Mississippi River Basin and landowners are essential partners in their conservation. We surveyed Iowa agricultural landowners to (1) identify their experiences and beliefs regarding wetlands as a conservation practice and (2) identify barriers and opportunities to landowners in engaging in wetland conservation. We analyze if respondents are likely to conserve or restore wetlands and identify motivating factors for action or inaction. A lack of experience with and misinformation about wetlands, coupled with a lack of access to needed conservation knowledge networks, limits conservation action for women landowners, no matter their age cohort. We identify strategies for improving outreach and knowledge access among these landowners. Our analysis contributes important information about the influence of gender and social networks upon wetland conservation to the growing literature regarding landowners’, and specifically women landowners’, conservation decision-making.

Keywords:

• Agriculture
• conservation
• gender
• landowner
• networks
• wetlands

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback which greatly improved our article. We are also grateful to Jean Eells, Betty Wells, Peter Fritzell, and Richard Schultz for their assistance in advising our survey creation and reviewing our survey. We especially thank Molly Conway, Adam Frakes, and Lindsay Henderson for their assistance in constructing the sample frame and cleaning the data. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. EPA.

Notes

1 We assumed that female respondents identify as women and male respondents identify as men. While reckoning with the reification of the gender binary in survey research is beyond the scope of this paper, we emphasize that biological sex does not dictate one’s gender. We used this imperfect method of gender categorization in the absence of existing sex/gender landowner data and in effort to create a survey sample that could be compared with existing and ongoing landowner data, recognizing that it is an approximation.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Environmental Protection Agency Region 7 under grant number EPA-R7WWPD-11-001/WPDG CD97731801-0 granted to Iowa State University #005309844.