Bird feeders and rat traps: Understanding the relationships among psychosocial factors, wildlife observations, and yard management decisions

Abstract

Residential yards and gardens provide a multitude of benefits for people, including green infrastructure, access to nature, and improved mental health. Yards can also benefit wildlife by providing habitat, food and other resources. Previous studies have shown that people manage their gardens in different ways to attract or deter wildlife and that visible wildlife diversity can increase people’s investment in nature and resource provisioning. These relationships between people and wildlife could form feedbacks with long-term consequences for biodiversity, but the way that various factors, including observations and perceived presence of wildlife in residential gardens, affect people’s management decisions remains largely unexplored. To understand how these relationships shape yard management decisions, we organized and synthesized existing international scientific literature on wildlife gardening, identified major gaps in current knowledge, and suggest directions for future research that could improve our understanding of the dynamic, potentially reciprocal relationships between residents, their gardening behaviors, and wildlife. We identified 53 relevant studies from North America, South America, Europe, Oceania, Africa, and Asia. Most studies employed a qualitative approach to examine how attitudes toward wildlife influenced gardening behavior, with other determinants of wildlife gardening relatively understudied in the context of this literature search. Only five studies directly asked residents about wildlife observations or perceived presence of wildlife on their properties and related those observations to attitude or actual yard management behavior. For future research, we suggest that researchers measure multiple determinants of yard management decisions and conduct experimental and longitudinal studies to improve our understanding of the feedback loops between people and wildlife in residential landscapes.