Data from: Common approaches to introduced species management face widespread acceptance problems in the United States
Data files
May 14, 2025 version files 675.55 KB
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MgmtAttitudes.final.data.csv
673.04 KB
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README.md
2.51 KB
Abstract
Decisions on whether and how to manage introduced species can be controversial, but public attitudes towards introduced species management (ISM) are poorly understood. Despite potential disruptive impacts of such controversies to public relations and conservation goals, decision makers are currently left with little information on social acceptability of different management alternatives.To better understand social acceptability of core features of ISM in the United States, we conducted an online experiment with vignettes describing hypothetical but realistic ISM scenarios, varying targeted taxon (insect or plant), control method (mechanical, chemical, biological), risk severity (low, high), and type of non-target risk (to humans or native species). Not surprisingly, management with low risk was most acceptable, particularly for mechanical control. In high-risk scenarios, only mechanical control was acceptable but only by a slim majority of respondents. Overall, chemical and biological control showed low levels of acceptability. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference in how respondents ranked risks to people and risks to native species. Beyond differences in acceptability between management factors, we also find that acceptability of management and attitudes toward risk were associated with respondents’ demographic characteristics.
Dataset DOI: 10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbsc6
Description of the data and file structure
Data underpinning analysis presented in Simmons et al (2025), 'Common approaches to introduced species management face widespread acceptance problems in the United States'
Files and variables
File: MgmtAttitudes.final.data.csv
Description: This data set includes a majority of columns necessary to replicate model fitting, selection, and comparisons outlined in the manuscript. Note that some data (latin identity, age) are not available here due to Dryad standards for protecting identities of human research subjects. A full dataset is available by request.
Variable names mean:
- score: Acceptability of proposed introduced species management scenario described in vignettes
- Taxon: Type of introduced organism targeted with management (plant, insect), as stipulated in vignette
- Method: Type of control method proposed in the management (biological, chemical, mechanical) , as stipulated in vignette
- Risk.Level: Severity of risks associated with proposed management (high, low), as stipulated in vignette
- Risk.Target: Type of non-target risk associated with management (risks to human well-being, risks to native species), as stipulated in vignette
- gender: participant's gender
- politics.score: participant's political identity, collapsed into 'liberal', 'conservative', 'moderate' categories
- education: participant's education level, collapsed into less than or more than an associate's degree
- income: participant's income range
- land: categories of amount of land owned by participant
- ID: randomly assigned identifier for each participant
- rural_past: whether the participant grew up in a rural or urban setting
Code/software
Analysis in R Version 4.2.0. Models were built with the 'ordinal' package, and marginal means calculated and tested with 'emmeans'
Access information
Other publicly accessible locations of the data:
- There are no other publicly accessible versions of the data.
Data was derived from the following sources:
- An online experiment hosted on the Qualtrics platform
Human subjects data
All respondents consented to publication of de-identified data prior to completing this survey. Qualtrics, who was hired to collect this data, de-identified data prior to sending it to the research team.