Stakeholder attitudes toward forest management in southern Illinois: An application of photo-evaluation surveys

Diverse public opinions, competing management goals and polarized interest groups combine with problems of scale to create a complex management arena for public land managers in the southern Illinois region. Laws, codes and mandates dictate the minimal levels at which the public must be involved in natural resource decision making, especially with regard to federal lands. However, history has demonstrated on the Shawnee National Forest (SNF) that simply meeting standards can result in time consuming and costly litigation. An expanding body of literature exists that demonstrates that stakeholders' acceptance of a management plan or decision is not based solely on scientific reasoning. Rather, acceptability is directly related to the perceived fairness of the planning/decision-making process and the level of inclusion in the process.;This study seeks to develop a photo-evaluation survey technique that will allow managers to effectively elicit stakeholder attitudes about forest management practices. To this end, stakeholder groups that use the Shawnee National Forest (SNF) rated color photographs of forest management treatments. Three management themes, harvesting, prescribed fire, and trails were selected because they represent significant management goals of the 1992 Amended Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP) that was mired in litigation and the 2006 LRMP that was finalized early in 2006. Responses to the three targeted management themes were elicited by photographs paired with a semantic differential attitude measurement scale. Each theme was represented by three photographs depicting a stage of a management treatment on an implied temporal scale. Study findings address the usefulness of an attitude measurement tool for avoiding future conflict or litigation as were characteristic of the SNF management plan process in recent decades.