Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Less Fond? Spatial Proximity Partially Predicts Family Forest Landowner Engagement

Families constitute the largest forest ownership group in the United States. Previous research has suggested that absenteeism influences how families perceive, use, and manage their land. The extent to which prior findings are sensitive to different definitions of absenteeism is unclear, however. In this paper, the distance between landowners’ residences and their forest land was calculated in order to compare different measures of absenteeism in terms of their statistical relationships with management and engagement activities. Data from the National Woodland Owner Survey were used to establish six binary definitions of an absentee owner based on fixed distances between landowners and their land. Bivariate tests were run to determine whether there were significant differences across these definitions between resident and absentee owners in terms of eighteen management and engagement variables. For more than half of these variables, whether differences between the two groups were statistically significant or not depended on the chosen threshold. Logistic regression models were also used to predict the likelihood of a subset of four dependent variables based on the absolute value of the distance landowners live from their land. Three of these models—for invasive species removal, leasing land, and emotional attachment—had sufficient goodness of fit and a statistically significant distance parameter.