DOI: 10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbsc6
title: Data from: Common approaches to introduced species management face widespread acceptance problems in the United States

description: Decisions on whether and how to manage introduced species can be
 controversial, but public attitudes towards introduced species management
 (ISM) are poorly understood.  Despite potential disruptive
 impacts of such controversies to public relations and conservation goals,
 decision makers are currently left with little information on social
 acceptability of different management alternatives.To better understand
 social acceptability of core features of ISM in the United States, we
 conducted an online experiment with vignettes describing hypothetical but
 realistic ISM scenarios, varying targeted taxon (insect or plant), control
 method (mechanical, chemical, biological), risk severity (low, high), and
 type of non-target risk (to humans or native species). Not surprisingly,
 management with low risk was most acceptable, particularly for mechanical
 control. In high-risk scenarios, only mechanical control was acceptable
 but only by a slim majority of respondents. Overall, chemical and
 biological control showed low levels of
 acceptability. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference
 in how respondents ranked risks to people and risks to native
 species.  Beyond differences in acceptability between management
 factors, we also find that acceptability of management and attitudes
 toward risk were associated with respondents’ demographic characteristics.
description: # Common approaches to introduced species management face widespread
 acceptance problems in the United States Dataset DOI:
 [10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbsc6](10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbsc6) ## Description of the
 data and file structure Data underpinning analysis presented in Simmons et
 al (2025), 'Common approaches to introduced species management face
 widespread acceptance problems in the United States'  ### Files and
 variables #### File: MgmtAttitudes.final.data.csv **Description:** This
 data set includes a majority of columns necessary to replicate model
 fitting, selection, and comparisons outlined in the manuscript. Note that
 some data (latin identity, age) are not available here due to Dryad
 standards for protecting identities of human research subjects. A full
 dataset is available by request.  ##### Variable names mean: * score:
 Acceptability of proposed introduced species management scenario described
 in vignettes * Taxon: Type of introduced organism targeted with management
 (plant, insect), as stipulated in vignette * Method: Type of control
 method proposed in the management (biological, chemical, mechanical) , as
 stipulated in vignette * Risk.Level: Severity of risks associated with
 proposed management (high, low), as stipulated in vignette * Risk.Target:
 Type of non-target risk associated with management (risks to human
 well-being, risks to native species), as stipulated in vignette * gender:
 participant's gender * politics.score: participant's political
 identity, collapsed into 'liberal', 'conservative',
 'moderate' categories * education: participant's education
 level, collapsed into less than or more than an associate's degree *
 income: participant's income range * land: categories of amount of
 land owned by participant * ID: randomly assigned identifier for each
 participant * rural_past:  whether the participant grew up in a rural or
 urban setting  ## Code/software Analysis in R Version 4.2.0. Models were
 built with the 'ordinal' package, and marginal means calculated
 and tested with 'emmeans' ## Access information Other publicly
 accessible locations of the data: * There are no other publicly accessible
 versions of the data. Data was derived from the following sources: * An
 online experiment hosted on the Qualtrics platform ## Human subjects data
 All respondents consented to publication of de-identified data prior to
 completing this survey. Qualtrics, who was hired to collect this data,
 de-identified data prior to sending it to the research team.