Mapping landowners' willingness to allow recreational deer harvest on their property for managing chronic wasting disease

Abstract Effective wildlife management balances ecological benefits and sociopolitical costs. Predicting spatial variation in stakeholder values and attitudes can help identify where certain management actions best align with local preferences and values. Private landowners can facilitate or impede landscape‐scale management goals by controlling access to their property. Strategic implementation of management actions informed by data on landowner preferences has the potential to improve outcomes. We used a multi‐step approach to map the probability of landowner willingness to allow recreational harvest on their property to reduce the spread of chronic wasting disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disease in wild and captive cervid populations. First, we used multilevel Bayesian logistic regression to model landowner willingness to allow recreational deer harvest on their property using data from an attitudinal survey administered in Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, North Dakota, Virginia, and Wyoming, USA, from August 2023 to March 2024. We found that landowners with larger properties were more likely to allow recreational harvest on their land, as were younger and wealthier landowners and those whose properties were predominantly wetland. We suggest that managers target areas with large properties to increase the effectiveness of recreational deer harvest to mitigate CWD transmission. Next, we used poststratification to generate spatial predictions from the fitted model at the census tract level across the contiguous United States by combining demographic data from the United States Census Bureau, tax parcel polygons from state and county repositories, and land cover data. Our modeling framework combined datasets from different spatial extents and resolutions to highlight geographic variation in predicted landowner responses, including estimates of uncertainty, from an attitudinal survey. This approach can be applied to many social‐ecological challenges and provides decision‐makers with a valuable tool for identifying areas where efforts to involve stakeholders in management programs might be more successful than efforts using a less strategic approach for public engagement.