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Abstract Declines in hunter numbers across the United States make hunter recruitment, retention, and reactivation (R3) a high priority for wildlife management. As wildlife management agencies and nongovernmental organizations seek to reach new audiences, college campuses present a unique opportunity to cultivate nontraditional path hunters. Despite recent proliferation of R3 initiatives, little research has evaluated effects of hunting programs on knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of new hunters. We designed and implemented Getting Started Outdoors: Hunting 101 workshops specifically targeting college students without previous hunting experience, and we assessed workshop efficacy with a theoretically‐grounded approach to workshop evaluation. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis of surveys conducted before, shortly after, and 12–18 months after workshops, we assessed impacts of R3 efforts at large public universities in 16 different U.S. states. Across all states, 19 workshops attracted 314 total participants, with 255 completing both pre‐ and post‐workshop assessments and 133 completing the follow‐up surveys. Workshops significantly increased participants' confidence in hunting, reduced barriers related to inadequate knowledge and skills, and fostered positive views of hunters and hunting. Immediately after workshops, most participants said they would definitely (50%) or probably (34%) hunt in the future; 82% said they would likely (or very likely) purchase a hunting license. Over one year after the workshops, 34% of workshop participants reported having hunted, and another 45% said they would probably hunt in the future. Overall, workshops attracted a diverse population of potential hunters, increased interest in future hunting, and created hunting advocates. Findings highlight the potentially powerful impact that R3 programs focused on diverse college students can have on the future of hunting across the United States.

Abstract Insufficient funding is a major impediment to conservation efforts around the world. In the United States, a decline in hunting participation threatens sustainability of the “user‐pay, public benefit” model that has supported wildlife conservation for nearly 100 years, forcing wildlife management agencies to contemplate alternative funding strategies. We investigated support for potential funding options among diverse college students, a rapidly expanding and politically active voting bloc with a potentially powerful influence on the future of conservation. From 2018 to 2020, we surveyed 17,203 undergraduate students at public universities across 22 states. Students preferred innovative approaches to conservation funding, with 72% supporting funding derived from industry sources (e.g., natural resource extraction companies), 63% supporting state sources (e.g., general sales tax), and 43% supporting conventional user‐based sources such as license fees and excise taxes associated with outdoor recreation activities (e.g., hunting). Findings emphasize the need to broaden the base of support for conservation funding and highlight the importance of considering the preferences and perspectives of young adults and other diverse beneficiaries of wildlife conservation.

The decline in the number of hours Americans spend outdoors, exacerbated by urbanization, has affected people’s familiarity with local wildlife. This is concerning to conservationists, as people tend to care about and invest in what they know. Children represent the future supporters of conservation, such that their knowledge about and feelings toward wildlife have the potential to influence conservation for many years to come. Yet, little research has been conducted on children’s attitudes toward wildlife, particularly across zones of urbanization. We surveyed 2,759 4–8th grade children across 22 suburban, exurban, and rural schools in North Carolina to determine their attitudes toward local, domestic, and exotic animals. We predicted that children who live in rural or exurban areas, where they may have more direct access to more wildlife species, would list more local animals as “liked” and fewer as “scary” compared to children in suburban areas. However, children, regardless of where they lived, provided mostly non-native mammals for open-ended responses, and were more likely to list local animals as scary than as liked. We found urbanization to have little effect on the number of local animals children listed, and the rankings of “liked” animals were correlated across zones of urbanization. Promising for conservation was that half of the top “liked” animals included species or taxonomic groups containing threatened or endangered species. Despite different levels of urbanization, children had either an unfamiliarity with and/or low preference for local animals, suggesting that a disconnect between children and local biodiversity is already well-established, even in more rural areas where many wildlife species can be found.

Environmental education often advocates for individual pro-environmental behavior--which, while beneficial to a degree, fails to match the large scale of today's capitalism-fueled socio-ecological challenges. Rather, collective action holds promise as a means for the large-scale changes required in the Capitalocene. These actions can take the shape of encouraging group uptake of behaviors (collective non-activist behaviors) or through fostering system change (collective activist behaviors). This study works to understand how well the environmental literacy framework combined with the theory of planned behavior predicts collective environmental behaviors, using North Carolina high school students as a study population. We find that, while these models effectively predict student engagement in individual environmental behaviors (adjusted R[superscript 2] = 0.39), they are less accurate at predicting engagement in collective non-activist behaviors (adjusted R[superscript 2] = 0.17) and collective activist behaviors (adjusted R[superscript 2] = 0.10). Thus, more research and theory-building are needed to understand what drives collective behavior among youth and beyond.

This paper reports on the results of a research-practice partnership that included a U.S. university research team and a state-funded grants program that supports informal science education. The goal of the 2-year partnership was to develop an empirically-tested model for collaboration and capacity-building (CCB) in support of collective evaluation. The model was implemented with 23 informal science education (ISE) organizations across one U.S. state. A comparison of pre and post-surveys indicate that the goals of the CCB model were attained. Participants reported an (1) increased perception of a common agenda, (2) increased capacity for conducting evaluation, and (3) increased peer-peer engagement. Participants also highlighted ongoing barriers to collective evaluation and suggested specific supports to overcome these barriers. This collaborative capacity-building model, although tested with ISE providers, is generalizable to other collective evaluation efforts.