Gaining insights into what drives landowners' decisions to allow hunting on their land is vital for wildlife management, particularly given rapidly expanding suburban and urban environments. Through a cooperative project with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC), researchers at NC State University successfully created a spatial-predictive model to estimate land available for hunting utilizing data from surveys of nonindustrial and industrial private landowners. Increasing property size, male ownership, length of time the property has been owned, property being used to earn income, and landowners with a rural upbringing were all positively related to a property being hunted. Higher housing and road density and older landowners were negatively related to a property being hunted. County estimates of the amount of available hunting land were calculated by running all privately owned parcels in North Carolina through the model. A second cooperative project between NCWRC and NC State is updating and expanding on the model, exploring how political identity predicts landowners' decisions about whether hunting will occur on their properties while accounting for several important socio-demographic and geographic variables and utilizing data from a survey of residents along an urban-to-rural gradient in Durham County, North Carolina. Findings of the most recent study revealed political identity as a significant predictor of hunting permission, with conservative landowners being 6 times more likely to permit hunting than their liberal counterparts. Gender also emerged as a notable factor, as properties owned by men were three times more likely to be hunted than those owned by women. Road density, gender, and political identity were identified as negative predictors of landowner hunting decisions in decreasing order of importance. Conversely, property size was the most important positive predictor for landowners allowing hunting, and the most important predictor of hunter access overall. These results illustrate the necessity of incorporating political, demographic, and geographic elements in discussions about how to effectively communicate with landowners regarding hunting access for wildlife management purposes, and the model can also improve wildlife population estimates by improving huntable land estimates.
