Hi everybody, welcome back to the Step Outside Podcast. I'm your host, Kristina Lackman. Today we have a PhD student with us. Her name is Kristina Watkins and she's working with Dr.
Anilam Kudyal. Welcome Kristina. Hey, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being here and taking the time to call in to another Zoom call.
We are still working from home at the University of Tennessee, so Kristina and I are meeting via Zoom once again. So please forgive us if our audio quality isn't perfect. Kristina, can we start off with you just kind of outlining your dissertation research and tell us what you're studying? Yeah, so I work with Dr.
Anilam Kudyal in our department and I study human dimensions of wildlife, which is kind of any sort of wildlife management that has to do with human interactions, which is a big chunk of wildlife management. I do a lot of survey research and ask people about their opinions about different wildlife management techniques and different attitudes and things people may have about wildlife in general or management or even recreation issues as well. So within that sort of broad spectrum of human dimensions, studies my dissertation dealt with sort of dealt surrounding this elk reintroduction project here in East Tennessee that started about 20 years ago in 2000. They brought in about 200 elk from this elk reserve in Canada over a couple years in the early 2000s and that was brought into this area called the North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area, which is just about an hour or so north of us here in Knoxville.
I think it's in like Anderson and there's a couple of different counties, still but northwest of us here in Knoxville. And so they brought these elk in about 20 years ago and the population has evolved a bit. They're growing and because the elk can move around, they are starting to get off public land and getting out into private property causing some issues with the people who live around on that sort of the border. And that sort of the borders and outskirts of this public land area.
So my dissertation research kind of dealt with some of those issues with the elk now that they're growing and moving around a lot. The study itself had a lot of different questions about damage and risks and all these things that these elk are sort of imposing on to the people who live around that area. But my dissertation had to deal a lot with how people who live in that area, how they trust the agency, Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency or TWRA, how much trust they have in that agency and how that trust affects their willingness to cooperate or go along with management, alternatives management objectives and support this introduction. Now that it's 20 years later and they're going to use to elk on a landscape and dealing with some of those issues.
My first chapter of the dissertation deals with the structural equation model that lets you look at psychosocial constructs like risk perceptions and trust and how those kind of interplay with each other to affect support for this reintroduction. And then another study had to deal with sort of the economic impact of this relationship between these different ideas. And then my third chapter of dissertation had to step back and look at wildlife introductions around the world because rededucing wildlife is this sort of new science that's only been around for about 20 years or so. And it's in response to the global losses in biodiversity that we have around the world where habitat loss and fragmentation, all these other things are causing species numbers to go down.
So this reintroduction sort of come about in that process and try to correct that. And a lot of the research so far in wildlife introduction stuff has been in the biology of animal behavior and habitats and all that sort of stuff. But this part of my dissertation was arguing that you can't discount the social human dimension side of wildlife introductions and that you need to do more research in that. So that's kind of a broad overview of the dissertation.
Yeah, that's awesome. What I thought was really fascinating about your research is that it's so interdisciplinary. So you're a forestry student. So it's obviously includes forestry, but it also includes wildlife management and human psychology.
Yeah. When you were starting off as a forestry student, were you forced to undergrad? No, I went to the University of Virginia and I studied environmental science. And I've always been sort of an interdisciplinary kind of person.
I've never really had a one track mind in that sort of way. But I was interested in environmental policy and how that interplays with wildlife, biology and conservation. And then so when I met up with Dr. Poojal, we like mesh right away.
It's like exactly what I wanted to study with the human and policy implications of wildlife and conservation management issues. That's great. I love seeing the disciplines work together. I think that's fascinating.
Tell us a little bit about how looking into the perceptions of people right now, how do they perceive the management of the elk and the management by TWRA? Yeah. Well, first of all, Dr. Miller is doing a fantastic study right now on actually figuring out what the situation with elk is in the area, how many of our with the population is.
I'm sure you talked to some of the other grad students who learn all about that side of the study, which is really interesting in its own. So we were dealing with sort of how are people perceiving that? And that isn't necessarily always meshed with what's actually happening. So if you are a landowner and you hear about something that happened like 20 elk or on someone's property, even if you've never seen elk on your property, you might be very concerned about that.
And whether or not that's a real risk for you doesn't exactly matter as much as the perception of those risks. But luckily when it came to the study, the elk problem, as damage and getting on to private property and things sort of localized to not that many people. It was surprising we sent a survey out to 5,000 residents who lived in the five counties right around where the elk have been introduced. And you know, good chuk of them weren't even totally aware that they were elk.
It's not the most publicized. And you know, the state of the city doesn't even know that much either. I saw a WVIR article a few months ago that said that everybody knows about the elk that are in the Smoky Mountains, that sort of area. And the article said that, oh, that's something you can see elk in this whole area.
And I actually commented like, no, hey, there's elk in Tennessee too. We're like, you don't have to go to the store. We have elk here. It's kind of not well known.
So the people who are dealing with that problem is like very small minority. So overall, our study found with this 5,000 surveys that we sent out. And there's fairly low receptions. People were most concerned about hitting an elk with your car, which is not like hitting a deer.
They're elk are a lot bigger. Right. Yeah. It would be terrifying.
Yeah. So that was the biggest concern for the majority of residents, but those who lived closer to where the elk kind of have been hanging out. There was more concern about property damage and damage to crops of crop rotation and things like that. But overall risks were fairly low in area.
And then trust was moderate to high as well. So people are fairly trusting of the agency, which was pretty nice to see. In our study, we sort of broke trust down into two different sub components, where you have trust that we defined as sort of this interpersonal trust, where you trust the wildlife managers and professionals that are actually on the ground and you trust them and trust that they have the same goals as you and things like that. And then there was a more general confidence in their management capability.
So is agency good at effectively managing issues that are going to come with elk and different things like that. And we found that there was more confidence than there was in a personal trust, but you know, slightly different. There's still people who were moderate to trusting of the agency in both regards, but there was overall more confidence in the management capability of the agency over that sort of interpersonal trust. And that has to do with things like, you know, if you know one person who had a bad instance of the game or didn't, that travels around and then you know the game like a lot of times people's interaction with TWA officials is when they're going to take it for something like a person who has been on them.
So, you know, that's pretty common around the US that there's a little bit lower interpersonal trust, but people are fairly confident in the agency. And then you found that these risk perceptions people do have towards elk do negatively impact support for this conservation of these reintroduced species. But if you have strong trust and confidence in agency, then kind of counteract those risk perceptions. So the more trust and confidence you can build in with people who live around a wildlife introduction site, you're more likely to get people on board and in support of that.
Do other parts of the country have better levels of confidence and trust or are we doing pretty good? Yeah, I think usually the sort of studies done in relation to something like this is done in relation to a wildlife introduction. Other studies a lot in the trust and natural resources world have dealt with chronic wasting disease and trust in relation to that. And so a lot of studies have shown that people who trust in the managing agency of whatever state has chronic wasting disease, they trust agency, they're willing to believe in information that they put out and more willing to cooperate with management objectives to occur that.
And they're more likely to stay hunting and things like that. Okay. In terms of like general trust, you know, I'm going to do some conferences. I talked to somebody from some Midwestern state that said that people have had lower levels of trust in their area.
But I think it comes up when something happens. And I think it's been shown that the negative experience lasts longer in your memory than a positive counter. And it'd be interesting because the study was done, we collected it data in 2018. And, you know, the chronic wasting disease has now hit Tennessee.
So I'd be curious to see if that has affected trust. Now that's some sort of really negative sort of thing has happened. I wonder if trust would be affected by that now. That's a good question.
That would be a good question as well. In the cases where people don't have high levels of trust and confidence in the management strategies and the agencies that are managing, what are ways that are going to be affected by that? What are ways that they can work to build trust with the public? That's a great question.
When there's sort of low levels of trust, I think transparency and communication helps a lot. You see that a lot in the literature that having management plans that the public can comment on and see and then following up on those plans. It's one thing that have a management plan and that there's an elk strategic management plan is on TWA's website. So you can go and look at that.
Okay. There is sort of a plan up there for managing what to do with the nuisance elk on your property. So what do you do if there's one elk that's just coming on your property all the time, eating your crops, knocking your fences. There's a process in place that TWA can come over, they can assess a situation, they can help you out in various ways.
But one thing we found in our study was that that sort of confidence that we talked about is really dependent on build up of previous experiences. So people need to see that they're following up with this plan that it's happening in real life. Just because there's a plan out there doesn't mean that if you call this agency that they're going to send someone over. So the more that there's follow through and consistency that can really help to build trust.
And you don't have to really broadcast these sort of things because the word does travel by mouth. And if you have a neighbor that had a good experience that's likely to travel around as well. Right. Okay.
So in some cases an agency might have to work harder and in some cases if there's good word of mouth going around, they might have to try so hard to communicate everything. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. I think in the South Eastern US, especially there's sort of a not wanting government on your property at all.
So there's sort of, and whenever we do send out surveys, we do a lot of interesting comments that are relevant to the study. But that's not something to say. Sure. But then you know, if people will say these things, but then in a survey they'll say that they are generally confident and they have trust in agencies.
I think that's why I'm willing to trust. That's good to hear. Whenever I was looking over your research, I was not sure which way it was going to go because you know, you always hear harder stories about public perceptions of any number of programs that you can think of. So that was really encouraging to hear that people are generally okay with what's happening.
And I think I read also the public is interested in future generations being able to see the elk. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We're lucky with this elk introduction that elk are they called charismatic megafauna and that they are really pretty, really big.
You want to go see them and they are a big or a straw, which you know has more implications for the residents in that area. I think some of the survey comments we saw that people are saying that people are driving onto their private property to go look at the elk because they don't gather in fields and things. So that can have its own negative consequences. But you know, I think people are generally more excited to see an elk in their backyard than they are to see me like a deer around.
So yeah, like that, you know, elk is really kind of cool to look at. Right. Definitely charismatic. Yeah.
How will the framework that you've been using to complete your research and your dissertation? How can this be used for maybe for other agencies or other states? That's sort of one of the chapters of my dissertation. I really, I took that next step and I built sort of this framework so that agencies can look at different things whenever they want to do a reintroduction.
Like I said, we get kind of like you with elk because they're nice and pretty people like to look at them. But you know, there's lots of like conservation, reliance species that need that sort of reintroduction and need intensive management to survive and you know, they're endangered and things like that. And they're maybe not pretty or salamanders or slugs. How do you get public support for things like that?
And that's part of things we're looking at. But I think if, you know, the study study found that there are risks, but if you build that trust with people who live within their reintroduction site and you have that open communication, you get them involved in the process that they are more likely to be in support of these projects. And then a lot of it depends on the species that you're trying to introduce. The biggest controversy around introductions has to do with large carnivore introductions like Wolf, especially Yellowstone out there in the West.
Those can get a lot of backlash. So it's really important to have trust in that the management plan in place. You know, I think at West, if a wolf takes them to your cattle, there's something in plan for how to sort of mitigate that in the future or have some sort of plan to help out people whose livelihoods might be in danger because of this introduction. This is really interesting research.
And again, I love the combination of natural resources and psychology. I think that's really fascinating. So we really enjoyed having you here. And are there any parting words or thoughts you would like to leave us with?
Trying to be a proponent for getting human dimensions of social science out there and then come to National Resource Management. I know it's super important to know about wildlife habitats and behaviors and all these different things that really help with conservation management, but, you know, we live in this world that is just so dominated by humans on the landscape, everything you touch, even if you're in the National Park, you know, the fact that it's a park, then there's no development on there was because of human intervention, right? So everything in the everywhere you touch in the world has some way to perform a human intervention to it. There's no way to really do effective conservation of wildlife management without figuring out the human dimensions of any project.
Great point. It's really important that people take that seriously and do research in human dimensions. Fantastic. I love it.
Kristina, thank you again for joining us. This has been awesome to learn about your research and program that's going on right here in Tennessee. So I really enjoyed hearing about that. And I hope our listeners do as well.
And go check out the Hatfield Knob Tower, which is in the North Carolina management area. And that's where you can go and see the elk and they run in the fall. Also, I'll have to put that on my list. Hatfield Knob Tower.
Yeah. It'll be worth it to see these charismatic megafauna. Yeah. Awesome.
Thanks everyone for joining in. And we thank Kristina for her time. Please join us for the next episode of the Step Outside Podcast when we visit with another one of our fantastic grad students. For more real life solutions provided by the UT Institute of Agriculture, go to our website at ag.tenacy.edu.