I'm just back after a full-on week at the NZ ecological society conference in Wellington. We had 4 full days of idea sharing, inspiration and far too much cake, and it was really refreshing to be a part of a conference with such a supportive and welcoming vibe. Thank you, wonderful organizers!
I was happy to present something a little different to my usual work - socio-ecology! I talked about some research I've been doing as part of the social aims of our Farming & Nature conservation project. This work was carried out by my brilliant undergrad students Rueben Goh and Kelly D'Mello, and you can access the presentation on ResearchGate here. I'll also add the pdf to this site too, and at some point in future I'll upload the R code for the analysis in a separate post (once I've tidied it up a bit!!)
Briefly, we wanted to know whether, as a farmer, having neighbours doing conservation on their land makes you more likely to do conservation on yours, too. The nice thing about this question is that if it's true, we should see spatial and temporal autocorrelation in where farm conservation happens. So, we did some GIS analyses using QEII covenant data of spatial patterns of farm conservation nationally and by region, and modelled the probability of a farm having a covenant based on the numbers of neighbours with covenants, and the regional council.
Native trees coexisting with beef cattle on a NZ sheep and beef farm. Photo credit: David Norton
We found that yes, we do see spatial and temporal autocorrelation that indicate that neighbours might be having a positive effect! However, this effect varies by region, so we expect that differences in funding and policy in different councils have an effect, too. Basically, this suggests that both bottom-up (peer group influence) and top-down (policy) influences need to come together to increase buy-in for voluntary conservation schemes.
We're hoping to write this up and may do some further refining of our analyses first, but we're pretty excited about the results!
P.S. I'm aware that in my last post, I said the next post would be step 2 of the literature review. But my code for the cross-checking still needs some work before it's useful to other people, and I haven't had time to work on it. But it's on my to-do list!
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