Examining landowners' preferences for a chronic wasting disease management program

Private landowners are key partners in chronic wasting disease (CWD) management, especially in landscapes where there is limited public ownership. In this study, we evaluated landowners' preferences for alternative hypothetical CWD management programs using a stated choice experiment. We were particularly interested in understanding preferences for the use of financial incentives to motivate white‐tailed deer harvest and facilitate hunter access to private lands as potential CWD management tools. We used latent class analysis to characterize preference heterogeneity among landowners stemming from patterns of choice. We compared means and distributions of auxiliary variables related to landowners' perceived risks, trust, attitudes toward management, and sociodemographics across latent classes stemming from choice model results. The pooled model demonstrated that reducing deer population density, providing payments to landowners for CWD‐positive deer taken from their property, the form of incentives for public access, and banning recreational deer feeding had a small positive effect on respondents' choice of CWD management program. However, providing financial payments to hunters for harvesting CWD‐positive deer and the use of targeted culling had the opposite effect on choice. Latent class models revealed that a majority of respondents exhibited a pattern of preference where all forms of incentives exerted a negative effect on choice, but smaller subsets of landowners positively evaluate the use of some incentives. Post‐hoc contrasts revealed relationships between patterns of preferences and trust, risk, and attitudes toward CWD management with small to medium effects. Results demonstrated limited support for the use of financial incentives as a tool to manage access and harvest in the southeast Minnesota CWD management zone. This study is an investigation of southeast MN landowners' preferences for chronic wasting disease management; especially preferences for the use of financial incentives to change hunter and landowner behaviors. Incentives were negatively evaluated by a large subset of the population, although some landowners supported them.