Welcome to the technical sessions schedule for the 2015 SEAFWA Annual Meeting.
NEW THIS YEAR! The technical schedule is capable of being sorted by date (i.e, Monday, Nov. 2), track (i.e. Wildlife Technical Sessions), or session (i.e. Wildlife Session #1). You can also search for a presentation title (i.e. Changing Landscapes by Coalition), key term (i.e. striped bass), or presenter last name (i.e. Weaver). The sort and search functions can be found on the navigation panel on the right side of this page. If you hover over the "Schedule" button, you’ll also see different schedule view options (i.e. Grid or Simple). Try selecting each of them to see which view you prefer.
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SCHEDULE UPDATES: The session abstracts and timeslots are subject to change. This site will be updated as changes come in; please check back for updates.
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Amanda Kaeser, Adam Willcox –University of Tennessee
With deforestation and degradation contributing to massive habitat loss and large percentages of greenhouse gases emissions, it is imperative that better ways be found to reduce the destruction of the world’s forests. Community-based conservation (CBC) programs whose goals are to conserving local forest ecosystems have been shown to work in some developing countries. To address illegal deforestation issues, communities surrounding the Vaca Forest Reserve (VFR) in western Belize have created a CBC program to increase community member presence in the reserve doing sustainable activities and to empower local forest management. However, many barriers to community involvement still persist, specifically with regard to women. With mounting research showing the many benefits of having women involved in CBC efforts, the purpose of this research was to quantify the attitudes and barriers to women participating in a CBC program in western Belize. We conducted 500 surveys in May-June 2015, with the women in the communities surrounding the VFR, to measure their interest in, attitudes toward, and possible barriers to participating in a CBC program. The women’s intent to participate in CBC activities will be modeled using the Reasoned Action Approach in order to identify the attitudinal, normative, and control constructs that best predicts their participation. Understanding the relative importance of these constructs and how they influence women’s participation will allow stakeholders to design an effective conservation program to engage women in forest conservation enterprises.
