More forest more problems? Understanding family forest owners’ concerns in the United States

Forests face an increasing number of threats of both natural and human cause, many of which are expected to increase in frequency and intensity in the future. Recent calls in the literature have pointed out the need for holistic approaches when developing ecosystem and forest management policies, which requires a broad understanding of how forest owners perceive the uncertainties and risks that may threaten their forests. In this paper, we study a set of sixteen concerns in the United States National Woodland Owners Survey (NWOS). Our set of concerns span a broad array of types and causesnatural and anthropogenicthat capture multiple aspects of forest ownership. We measure the level of concern that family forest owners associate with each concern variable, and explore how the levels of concern vary with each other. We then turn our attention to the "total concernedness" of forest owners by summing the level of concern across all concern variables to study how individuals distribute their concerns across multiple ownership challenges. Finally, we relate an individual's total concern to his/her socio-demographic and forest-ownership attributes to understand how variation in these factors may be associated with an owner's level of overall concernedness. We find that private forest owners report moderate levels of concern, on average, for all concerns in the NWOS, and that concerns are, in general, positively correlated with each other. Moreover, forest owners tend to distribute their concerns evenly across all types of concerns, as opposed to high levels of one concern and none for the others. Among our results, we discuss implications of the finding that the majority of forest owners in our survey express moderate levels of concern for most ownership challenges. Our analysis highlights a general need for forest policy and regulations that properly consider the full suite of owner preferences, benefits, and costs, including concerns.