Advancing Evidence-Based Decision-Making in Large Landscape Conservation Through the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda for the Yellowstone to Yukon Region

Abstract

As the world's mountains are significant hotspots of biodiversity and home to hundreds of millions of people, they are ideal locations in which to investigate and develop the conservation social sciences in a systematic way to help inform conservation decision-making and policy. Here, we discuss the development of a social science research agenda for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a transboundary environmental organization working in Canada and the United States. We suggest that this process is useful for others to undertake in similar conservation landscapes and mountain systems as we strive to better understand how people live in, play in, benefit from, and visit the globe's mountain regions. We outline an agenda for collaborative social science research in the Yellowstone to Yukon region related to 4 themes and offer 12 priority questions as launching points for interested researchers to explore in more detail. Through a review of relevant literature on the 4 themes, we identify research gaps that, if addressed, could usefully inform decision-making across the Yellowstone to Yukon region. Finally, we call on the research community to focus its curiosity and resources on answering these questions and encourage funders and institutions to support them in doing so.