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With increasing threats facing ecosystems around the world, conservationists are looking for innovative approaches to address the complex nature of transboundary issues. Large landscape conservation (LLC) extends beyond protected area boundaries and potentially national borders. Though the recognition of LLC is growing, we have a limited understanding of what supports or inhibits LLC efforts across diverse geographies, which limits the efficacy of LLC as a strategy to combat ecological threats. Networks can provide support for individual LLC initiatives through collaboration, knowledge exchange, and resource mobilization. Despite the growth in LLC initiatives around the world, there has been a lack of research assessing a network of initiatives—research that is critical to complement individual case studies. To gain a greater understanding of LLC, we conducted a survey of the Transboundary Conservation and the Connectivity Conservation Specialist Groups of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas. The survey explored key factors that inhibit or support landscape-scale governance and overall success. Findings reveal key patterns and unique aspects of LLC initiatives. Additionally, this study underscored the need to address the complexity of multiple scales of governance while meaningfully strengthening relationships at the local scale, and specifically with Indigenous populations. These findings can inform best practices and management techniques to increase successful governance by managers, researchers, and other conservation professionals to support effective and equitable LLC initiatives.Keywords: Connectivity, large landscape, transboundary, global networks, IUCN, World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA)

The COVID-19 pandemic has uniquely impacted US National Park Service (NPS) units. This study seeks to help inform future visitor use management and planning by compiling data from five NPS units (Acadia, Glacier, Grand Teton, Shenandoah, and Yellowstone National Parks), focusing on how the pandemic influenced management and impacted visitor use. Data were collected from both park managers and visitors. Results provide understanding regarding managerial changes, user-capacity limits, and documented changes in visitation in 2020 compared to 2019. These results are coupled with park visitor data from 2020, including visitor demographics, motivations and perceived outcomes, information sources for visiting during the pandemic, potential behavioral shifts in response to COVID-19 while on-site, and intent to visit in the future. The results suggest that the distinct shifts in visitation patterns during 2020 impacted park managers’ ability to predict and efficiently respond to visitor use changes. This issue was exacerbated by staffing shortages attributed to the pandemic. Lessons learned regarding what worked well (e.g., respondents were able to achieve health-related outcomes), and what could be improved (e.g., knowing that visitors adapted behaviors to maintain personal safety, and future staffing allocations can be focused temporally and spatially based on these 2020 use trends) can be incorporated to help prepare park managers, surrounding gateway communities, and state tourism authorities for the future.

Thru-hiking is an immersive recreational activity that involves hiking over long periods and often traversing thousands of miles of trail across multiple states. This unique recreation activity is growing rapidly, yet there are limited studies in the outdoor recreation field about the short- and long-term challenges and how individuals navigate challenges during the different phases of the thru-hike experience. To better understand the multiple phases of the thru-hiking experience, this study focused on the thru-hikers of the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail (PNNST). Multi-phase semi-structured interviews were conducted with PNNST thru-hikers before their hike (anticipation phase), directly after completion (on-site phase), and two months after completion (recollection phase). The research illuminated the importance of physical and psychological preparation, how thru-hikers navigated challenges while hiking, and how hikers transitioned to everyday life. These findings contribute to the outdoor recreation field's understanding of the unique aspects of thru-hiking as a recreational activity and can inform management practices to support a positive, safe, and transformational experience across the different phases of recreation.

Decades of research emphasize that information alone rarely influences environmental behavior. We addressed the question of, "what, then, does influence environmental behavior?" by asking more specifically: what factors mediate the relationship between learning about environmentally related issues and engaging in environmentally related behaviors? Following Yin's case study approach, we designed a California (USA)-based case study focused on four everyday-life activities: purchasing food, commuting, engaging in leisure activities, and interacting with mobile technology. We grounded the study in four propositions that previous sociological, psychological, and learning sciences research suggested might influence learning--behavior connections in complex everyday-life contexts. To address the propositions across the four cases, we conducted 197 short, semi-structured interviews grounded in a narrative, relational frame. Using thematic content analysis, we found support for three of our propositions as mediators of learning--behavior connections; we also uncovered two emergent themes. Our findings suggest a web of elements that affect learning--behavior connections; those elements offer insights for environmentally related programming.

Despite increasing expertise and resources for planning ecological corridors, initiatives face implementation challenges in integrating science and governance. The coproductive capacities framework identifies normative, cognitive, social, and material factors that support scientifically-informed action. This study asked how coproductive capacities enable transition from planning to implementation in the Sangay-Podocarpus Connectivity Corridor (Corredor de Conectividad Sangay-Podocarpus; CCSP), Ecuador's first designated corridor, linking multiple national parks with extraordinary biodiversity. We assessed capacities through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with CCSP stakeholders. We find that the CCSP possesses strong normative capacities with a shared vision for social-ecological wellbeing and understanding of threats. Cognitive capacities are supported by biophysical science but lack integration with social science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Social capacities vary depending on scale. Material capacities are compromised by insufficient funding and human resources. Corridor implementation depends on strong, diverse, highly interdependent capacities, which highlights the need for targeted capacity-building to sustain effective connectivity conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in wildland recreation is associated with a range of individual-level outcomes. Although these outcomes have been extensively studied, few studies have systematically examined and summarized this empirical evidence. Therefore, the goals of this study include identifying (1) the breadth of individual-level outcomes associated with wildland recreation, (2) the setting and programmatic attributes that research suggests are driving these outcomes, and (3) the gaps in the peer-reviewed literature regarding the outcomes associated with wildland recreation. We systematically examined 235 articles published between 2000 and 2016 that evaluated the psychological, social, and educational outcomes associated with participation in wildland recreation. We identified 11 broad categories, the most common related to personal development (59%), pro-social behaviors (52%), mental restoration (42%), and environmental stewardship (36%). Results highlight gaps in our knowledge regarding outcomes and their potential causes. We conclude by discussing trends and implications for managers and future research.

The Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail (PNT) traverses 1,200 miles from the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. The portion of the trail in Northwest Montana and the Idaho Panhandle is at the nexus of a complex conflict situation involving outdoor recreation, wildlife conservation, and social-cultural values. This evolving conflict has gained national attention due to the diverse stakeholder interests and litigation against the US Forest Service, who administers the trail. The tension among the stakeholder groups and the various ecological and socialcultural dimensions at play illuminate the complexity of managing long-distance trails. Administrators of long-distance trails must evaluate and mitigate social, ecological, and cultural risks. This research note explores complexity and trust ecology among key PNT stakeholders, and discusses opportunities for incorporating trust research in transboundary recreation planning and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Research on animal ethics in tourism has gained traction but posthumanist approaches to wildlife (eco)tourism remain sparse. There has never been a more urgent need to redress this paucity in theory and practice. More than 60% of the world's wildlife has died-off in the last 50 years, 100 million-plus nonhuman animals are used for entertainment in wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs), more than one billion "wildlife" live in captivity, and some scholars argue that earth has entered its sixth mass extinction event known as the Anthropocene. This paper presents a posthumanist multispecies livelihoods framework (MLF) based on an applied ethnographic study of 47 wildlife ecotourism (WE) operators and wildlife researchers in protected area WTAs across four countries. Like any framework, it is a snapshot of the authors' thinking at a particular time and must be improved upon. The MLF does not purport to solve the negative treatment of nonhumans that can occur in tourism settings, but rather responds to calls in the tourism literature to acknowledge our effects on other species and advocates for equitable human-nonhuman livelihoods. This paper argues that we have a moral responsibility to nonhumans and the environment, and the authors hope to generate reflexive discourse concerning the role tourism can play in redressing the ecological crisis and improving the treatment of individual nonhumans to foster wildlife-human coexistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]