10 pages., Via online journal., Development of natural resource user typologies has been viewed as a potentially
effective means of improving the effectiveness of natural resource management engagement
strategies. Prior research on Corn Belt farmers’ perspectives on climate change employed
a latent class analysis (LCA) that created a six-class typology—the Concerned, Uneasy,
Uncertain, Unconcerned, Confident, and Detached—to develop a better understanding of
farmer perspectives on climate change and inform more effective climate adaptation and
mitigation outreach strategies. The LCA employed 34 variables that are generally unobservable—beliefs about climate change, experience with extreme weather, perceived risks of
climate change, and attitudes toward climate action—to identify types. The research reported
in this paper builds on this typology of Corn Belt farmers by exploring 33 measures of observable farm enterprise characteristics, land management practices, and farmer demographics to
assess whether variations in these observable characteristics between the six farmer classes
display systematic patterns that might be sufficiently distinctive to guide audience segmentation strategies. While analyses detected some statistically significant differences, there were
few systematic, meaningful observable patterns of difference between groups of farmers with
differing perspectives on climate change. In other words, farmers who believe that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, that it poses risks to agriculture, and that adaptive action
should be taken, may look very much like farmers who deny the existence of climate change
and do not support action. The overall implication of this finding is that climate change
engagement efforts by Extension and other agricultural advisors should use caution when
looking to observable characteristics to facilitate audience segmentation. Additional analyses
indicated that the farmer types that tended to be more concerned about climate change and
supportive of adaptive action (e.g., Concerned and Uneasy) reported that they were more
influenced by key private and public sector actors in agricultural social networks. On the
other hand, farmers who were not concerned about climate change or supportive of adaptation (e.g., the Unconcerned, Confident, and Detached groups, comprising between one-third
and one-half of respondents) were less integrated into agricultural networks. This suggests that
Extension and other agricultural advisors should expand outreach efforts to farmers who are
not already within their spheres of influence.
9 pages., via online journal., Cross-property cooperation has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of environmental management actions that cut across property boundaries. Online tools can facilitate this and overcome barriers to landholder engagement in collaborative management. However, collaborative online tools need to be designed and tailored to users' needs and values, and landholder participation in the development process is critical to ensuring uptake and long-term use.
This article presents a case study from the Central Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia, where landholders have been involved in participatory development of a new online collaboration tool. The case study results highlight the significance of issues such as internet access, privacy, technical proficiency and differing stakeholder objectives. A landholder survey identified mapping and the uploading of monitoring data as important functions for the online tool, but these were not rated as highly as functions relating to data security, sharing settings and key term searches. Consequently, we recommend that a future online collaboration tool for the region is not framed specifically as a mapping or citizen science tool, but rather as an adaptive collaboration and communication tool that can incorporate a variety of data types and formats and be modified over time in line with changing landholder needs.
