Project Number: 5362-13610-011-05
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Feb 01, 2013
End Date: Jan 31, 2015

Objective:
Identification of strategies to facilitate adoption of weather-centric management and forecasting strategies by land management agencies and professional restoration planners.

Approach:
We will initiate two, closely linked studies: one of factors that can make the forecasting tools more accessible to managers in terms of perceived ease, and one that tests the utility of social marketing approaches to influence decision-making behavior toward the use of forecasting and other weather-centric planning tools. The first study will be accomplished through a combination of focus-group and delphi methods. The purpose of the initial groups will be to identify factors that influence the perceived usefulness of forecasting and weather-centric planning tools such as those that will be developed in this project. From within the membership of these groups we will recruit a smaller panel of volunteers who are willing to respond to a series of questions about the tools, each building on respondents’ answers to the previous question, during the tool-development phase. This technique, called delphi, is used by social scientists in combination with focus groups to fine-tune understanding of complex topics. Finally, a second set of focus groups will be conducted where the defined area of interest will be the set of forecasting and weather tools that we develop, in order to ascertain what potential users perceive as advantages and disadvantages of our approach when applied in both reactive and proactive restoration contexts.