Does gender really matter? How demographics and site characteristics influence behavior and attitudes of German small-scale private forest owners

When analyzing management behaviors of small-scale private forest owners, demographic variables such as income, age, or profession, and land characteristics such as forest holding size often emerge as important drivers. However, gender is frequently used in targeted outreach, even though the other variables regularly show higher predictive power. To shed light on this discussion, we examined the influences of a broad set of predictors including both land characteristics and sociodemographic factors such as gender on management activities, owner goals, perceived obstacles, and conservation attitudes as response variables. We used a questionnaire survey to collect quantitative data from 1268 small-scale private forest owners in northwestern Germany. Random forest models were used to predict the responses and to rank the predictors according to their variable importance. We found that the size of forest holdings often had a strong influence on economic activities, while the amount of broadleaf forest was important for conservation-oriented management decisions. While gender-specific outreach is a strong tool to empower formerly marginalized forest owner groups, gender was not found to be an important predictor of forest management activities in our analyses. We advocate considering other characteristics when conceiving communication with forest owners. In order to design carefully targeted policy instruments and outreach to forest owners, we propose a set of easily accessible owner parameters and land characteristics. These factors can guide more individualized conservation outreach strategies in small-scale private forests that are embedded in the overall livelihood systems of their owners.