Comparing and explaining public acceptance of ecological forestry in Tasmania and the U.S. Pacific Northwest

Background/Question/Methods Major controversies have erupted in recent years about extensive and intensive timber harvesting programs in Tasmania and the U.S. Pacific Northwest. These conflicts have centered on the ecological impacts of clearcuts, and both regions have responded by adopting similar programs of “ecological forestry.” These emphasize the retention of varying amounts of trees in aggregated or dispersed patterns within harvests, and seek to “life boat” mature-forest habitat functions across harvest prescriptions. Are these programs garnering similar public acceptance? Do people with similar ideologies judge the acceptability of forests similarly in both regions? How do these perceptions differ between regions due to differences in ecological, cultural or economic conditions? Similar public perception surveys within each region investigated the acceptance of a broad range of harvest prescriptions that matched closely between regions. In both surveys, images of the appearance of harvests were presented to respondents with expert-derived information about the magnitude of similar ecological, safety and economic impacts. Respondents rated the acceptability of each prescription. Respondents' environmental attitudes were classified as forest protectionist, productionist or non-aligned within each region. Statistical analyses compared the relative value and sources of comparable forests' mean acceptability ratings between the regions. Results/Conclusions Ideologically similar samples of respondents in both regions exhibited comparable patterns of increasing mean acceptability ratings with greater retention of trees for all retention patterns, except for one explained below. These comparable respondent samples exhibited similar correlations between acceptability ratings and levels of various harvest impacts, exhibiting common associations between ideologies and preferred impacts across regions. Three exceptions showed that Tasmanians exhibited more sensitivity to (1) ground habitat impacts, likely attributable to greater retention of down wood in all Pacific Northwest prescriptions versus burning most down wood in some Tasmanian prescriptions (to regenerate commercial species); (2) logger safety, likely attributable to greater differences in actual safety levels across the Tasmanian prescriptions; and (3) wildfire risk, likely because the affected Pacific Northwest region has few historical wildfires. Utility functions were estimated for each region's respondents and applied to the opposite region's forests. This indicated that both regions' respondents would agree about the lower acceptability of 30-40% dispersed retention harvests in Tasmania. This is likely because Tasmanians retain only commercial species while felling all other trees (and aggregated harvests there lifeboat ecosystems more), versus Americans' retention of a percent of all tree types, retaining more trees and ecosystem components.