Engaging private landowners in conservation activities for imperiled species is critical to maintaining and enhancing biodiversity. Market‐based approaches can incentivize conservation behaviors on private lands by shifting the benefit–cost ratio of engaging in activities that result in net conservation benefits for target species. In the United States and elsewhere, voluntary conservation agreements with financial incentives are becoming an increasingly common strategy. While the influence of program design and delivery of voluntary conservation programs is often overlooked, these aspects are critical to achieving the necessary participation to attain landscape‐scale outcomes. Using a sample of family‐forest landowners in the southeast United States, we show how preferences for participation in a conservation program to protect an at‐risk species, the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus), are related to program structure, delivery, and perceived efficacy. Landowners were most sensitive to programs that are highly controlling, require permanent conservation easements, and put landowners at risk for future regulation. Programs designed with greater levels of compensation and that support landowners' autonomy to make land management decisions can increase participation and increase landowner acceptance of program components that are generally unfavorable, like long‐term contracts and permanent easements. There is an inherent trade‐off between maximizing participation and maximizing the conservation benefits when designing a conservation incentive program. For conservation programs targeting private lands to achieve landscape‐level benefits, they must attract a critical level of participation that creates a connected mosaic of conservation benefits. Yet, programs with attributes that strive to maximize conservation benefits within a single agreement (and reduce risks of failure) are likely to have lower participation, and thus lower landscape benefits. Achieving levels of landowner participation in conservation agreement programs that deliver lasting, landscape‐level benefits requires careful attention not only to how the program structure influences potential conservation benefits, but also how it influences landowners and their potential to participate.

Sense of place holds promise to understand how people perceive and respond to social and ecological change; however, using this concept to explore vulnerability and adaptation first depends on identifying the multiple ways people define their relationship with a place. We introduce the meaning‐dependence framework to account for the broad array of person–place connections within social–ecological landscapes. We applied this framework to private landowners in the Southern Great Plains of the United States, a working landscape experiencing ecological transformation from grasslands to degraded woodlands. Using a mail survey, we explored the structure of sense of place based on the relationship between place meanings and place attachment. We employed complementary analytical methods: correlation analysis, ordinary least squares regression, and machine learning through a regression tree and random forest. Place meanings explained a large amount of variation in place attachment and were characterized by intercorrelations and interactions. Across analyses, experiential meanings reflecting personal psychological connections to one's land were the predominant drivers of landowners' place attachment.Way of lifeemerged as a central meaning for understanding sense of place on private lands. The meaning‐dependence framework builds on existing research to account for the multiple ways meanings inform human connections to a place. This framework is broadly applicable to any setting and can capture diverse configurations of person–place relationships and increase the utility of sense of place in social–ecological research. A freePlain Language Summarycan be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Provision of safe drinking water by water utilities is challenged by disturbances to water quality that have become increasingly frequent due to global changes and anthropogenic impacts. Many water utilities are turning to adaptable and flexible strategies to allow for resilient management of drinking water supplies. The success of resilience-based management depends on, and is enabled by, positive relationships with the public. To understand how relationships between managers and communities spill over to in-home drinking water behavior, we examined the role of trust, risk perceptions, salience of drinking water, and water quality evaluations in the choice of in-home drinking water sources for a population in Roanoke Virginia. Using survey data, our study characterized patterns of in-home drinking water behavior and explored related perceptions to determine if residents’ perceptions of their water and the municipal water utility could be intuited from this behavior. We characterized drinking water behavior using a hierarchical cluster analysis and highlighted the importance of studying a range of drinking water patterns. Through analyses of variance, we found that people who drink more tap water have higher trust in their water managers, evaluate water quality more favorably, have lower risk perceptions, and pay less attention to changes in their tap water. Utility managers may gauge information about aspects of their relationships with communities by examining drinking water behavior, which can be used to inform their future interactions with the public, with the goal of increasing resilience and adaptability to external water supply threats.