Research Brief: Communication Strategies to Prevent Unintentional Feeding of Wildlife

Dr. Katie Abrams, Colorado State University

What does your research hope to answer/investigate?

How can communication messages and strategies help encourage park visitors and campers to properly store their wildlife attractants so as to prevent unintentional wildlife feeding?

Please describe your process for investigation? Are there clear stages or benchmarks that your research project will have along the way?

We developed a campaign based on what other published research suggested could be more effective. We will then test this campaign in several national parks, including Acadia, by running an experiment. We will measure how well campers comply with park guidelines for storing wildlife attractants in two campgrounds. One campground will have the new campaign in place and the other will not, and by comparing the observations, we will learn whether this new campaign is more effective.

How does this research apply to what we might know about or how we might manage Acadia National Park?

We will be able to understand how to improve the park’s communication strategies and signs for visitors about storing their wildlife attractants, which should also help reduce instances of wildlife eating human food and other safety risks to visitors and wildlife alike.

How does this project help contribute to scientific understanding or management solutions beyond Acadia?

Acadia’s problems with campers not storing their wildlife attractants properly is a common problem among many campgrounds around the U.S. Because we’re testing the campaign in five different national parks in total, we expect to develop robust recommendations for more effective communication strategies parks can use and will share the templates for signs and other media for any campground to use.