Human Dimensions of Resource Management

Human dimensions in the context of natural resource management refers to understanding attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of American citizens in order to improve conservation and management of public lands and waters. Human Dimensions at the FORT also includes understanding the users and applications of data and technology in the context of natural resource management.

USGS and Colorado State University researchers are conducting analyses and predictions of sagebrush recovery in the Great Basin and Wyoming and assess the role of weather, soils, and reseeding treatments.

This interdisciplinary project combines expert judgment on treatment costs with spatially explicit ecological modeling to estimate the financial resources needed to address the threat of invasive annual grass across the entire sagebrush biome. Results of the assessment will provide economic insights that can inform cost-effective resource allocation to efficiently achieve sagebrush conservation...

The North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP) represents the foundational and successful effort to manage waterfowl and migratory bird in North America. Continued success of NAWMP depends on maintaining relevance to partners and society over time. Social science research supports NAWMP by providing a better understanding of what people value regarding waterfowl and their habitats.

Planning and managing outdoor recreation on public land and water entails a series of choices, many of which are economic in nature. Economics is useful for informing a wide range of decision-making processes in the context of outdoor recreation management, including why people choose to engage in recreation and where, how people substitute between different types of recreation activities and...

The Bureau of Land Management’s National Landscape Conservation System seeks to conserve, protect, and restore nationally significant landscapes. Science is a critical piece of this effort. The US Geological Survey is working with the Bureau of Land Management to develop Science Plans to help prioritize and support science efforts to better understand and manage resources in these landscapes.

The use of rare plant habitat models in land management decisions can be constrained by issues surrounding data access, model quality, and institutional capacity, among other factors. This project seeks to understand challenges associated with using habitat models and explore avenues for addressing these challenges to facilitate greater use of habitat models in public lands decision making.

Habitat models can provide critical information on the current and potential distribution of plant species, as well as help target and support conservation efforts. Despite their potential utility in public land management, model use may be constrained by a variety of factors including staff access to and trust in models. In this project, we seek to bring together model users and model developers...

Roads and their associated infrastructure can cause substantial and pervasive effects on adjacent ecosystems but are necessary for the movement and redistribution of goods, people, wealth, and natural resources in modern societies. The Fort Collins Science Center has initiated research looking at how roads and traffic may be impacting sagebrush ecosystems and the wildlife inhabiting them. This...

Coproduction is a highly collaborative approach to conducting science that focuses on producing actionable products that are used to inform natural resource management decisions. This project will develop an informational toolkit to facilitate coproduction between resource managers and science providers in the context of federal public land management.

The Bureau of Land Management Recreation and Visitor Services Program regularly conducts recreational visitor satisfaction surveys. The USGS Social and Economic Analysis Branch is assessing the visitor survey effort and recommending updates to the current effort.

As part of the Values Mapping for Planning in Regional Ecosystems project, also known as VaMPIRE, USGS scientists are developing a public participatory GIS application that aids in gathering information about visitors’ values for public lands and waters.