Publications

Julia Rouet-Leduc, Fons van der Plas, Aletta Bonn, Wouter Helmer, Melissa R. Marselle, Erica von Essen, Guy Pe’er. 2024. Exploring the motivation and challenges for land-users engaged in sustainable grazing in Europe. Land Use Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2024.107146

Grazing of both domestic and wild large herbivores can contribute to multiple ecosystem services. However, grazing systems strongly differ in the intensity of management and outcomes, and we define sustainable grazing as grazing which benefits multiple environmental ecosystem services. Previous studies have found that, in general, grazing systems with relatively low densities of animals, and with minimal and only targeted appl...

Samuel Shephard, Erica von Essen, Thorsten Gieser, Charles J. List, Robert Arlinghaus. 2024. Recreational killing of wild animals can foster environmental stewardship. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01379-7

Proposals to downsize the human population or protect large areas of the planet imply that biodiversity conservation is possible only when humans are excluded, but effective conservation action is shown by groups engaged in consumptive wildlife use. We demonstrate that recreational fishing and hunting can develop nature relationships that shape environmental stewardship. Sustainably catching, killing and eating wildlife is ide...

Lara Tickle, Erica von Essen, Anke Fischer. 2024. Fresh meat: Women's motivations to hunt and how they challenge hunting structures. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241239822

Hunting has a unique status as a sport and leisure activity alongside its practices having high stakes for society related to ecology, biosecurity, animal welfare and public safety. As such, hunting must increasingly legitimate itself before the public both in terms of ethically justifiable motivations for why to hunt and ethical standards for how to hunt. One way in which public acceptance has been sought in recent y...

David Redmalm, Erica von Essen. 2024. Bunnies and Biopolitics: Killing, Culling and Caring for Rabbits. The Biopolitical Animal.

Humans have an ambivalent relationship to rabbits: they are popular pets but are also widely used in the fur industry and as laboratory animals. As urban wildlife they are commonly considered to be pests. In any case, humans are preoccupied with their proliferation: they either breed them or inhibit their thriving through culling or other kinds of interventions. This essay draws on news articles, scholarly work, and examples f...

David A. Fennell, Carol Kline, Mucha Mkono, Bryan S. R. Grimwood, Valerie A. Sheppard, Katherine Dashper, Jillian Rickly, Georgette Leah Burns, Giovanna Bertella, Erica von Essen, José-Carlos García-Rosell, Yulei Guo, Hin Hoarau-Heemstra, Álvaro López López, Gino Jafet Quintero Venegas, Patrick J. Holladay, Christina T. Cavaliere, Kellen Copeland, Brian Danley, Jessica Bell Rizzolo, Chris E. Hurst, Rie Usui, Mikko Äijälä, Émilie Crossley, Kristine Hill, Michelle Szydlowski, Daniel Bisgrove, Samuel Blythe, Samuel R. Fennell, Sarah Oxley Heaney, Caroline Schuhmacher, Paul Tully, Sarah Coose, Jes Hooper, Rebecca Madrid. 2024. Tourism, animals & the vacant niche: a scoping review and pedagogical agenda. Current Issues in Tourism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2023.2280704

The topic of animal ethics has advanced in tourism studies since its inception in 2000, based on a diverse range of studies on species involvement, types of uses and contexts, level of engagement, states of animals, and theoretical perspectives. While there is still considerable scope to amplify research on animal-based tourism, a gap exists in tourism pedagogy amidst the field’s emphasis on a new expanding consciousness platf...

Erica von Essen, Jesse Peterson. 2024. Digital wildlife expeditions and their impact on human-wildlife relations: Inside the phenomenon of livestreaming an annual moose migration. Digital Geography and Society. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100097

Tracking, viewing and livestreaming wildlife in situ but online has enabled new relations of proximity and immediacy to proliferate among people who experience few real-life encounters with wild animals. Innovating affordances of programs, broadcasts, and citizen science apps to foster virtual encounters, both with the wild animals in front of the camera, and between other human users following them, now generate an arena of v...

Erica von Essen, Karin Ahlberg, Tomas Cole, Bengt G. Karlsson, Ivana Maček. 2024. Dealing with Biodiversity Dilemmas in Ordinary Places. Nature and Culture. https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2024.190301

The battle against invasive alien species (IAS) rages on, and is being driven by recently articulated global biodiversity agendas. While the current United Nations Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) seeks to ensure pristine, protected areas comprise 30 percent of the world's total surface area by 2030, there remains much to be done for the remaining 70 percent, areas dominated by human habitat and industrial activities. Many ...

Erica von Essen, Henriette Wathne Gelink, Helene Figari, Olve Krange. 2024. Hunting for volunteers: Toward understanding embedded motivations for citizen science contributions among Norwegian hunters in the case of wild boar. Journal of Environmental Management, Volume 373, January 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2024.123659

Governments increasingly appeal to citizens contribute to common goals in natural resource management, nature conservation or invasive species eradication. The contributing citizen is sometimes understood as able to graduate from being extrinsically motivated – by rewards, financial incentives or penalties – toward becoming intrinsicallymotivated. In this paper, we problematize the relative willingness of citizen contributions...

Laurel C. Field, Kendyl Wright, Jenna Sullivan-Stack, Jean M. Harris, Stephen P. Kirkman, Peter J. Fielding, Ané Oosthuizen, Siyabonga Dlulisa, Anastasiya Laznya, Emanuel J. Gonçalves, Kirsten Grorud-Colvert. 2024. Assessing South Africa’s marine protected area quality and progress towards conservation goals: An application of The MPA Guide framework. Marine Policy, Volume 173, 2025, 106513. ISSN 0308-597X. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2024.106513.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a widely used area-based conservation tool for preventing or reversing the loss of marine biodiversity and sustaining the social-ecological systems that it underpins. Global targets for ocean protection typically track the extent of ocean area within MPAs. However, understanding the effectiveness of protection is crucial, as the level of protection and associated benefits for biodiversity and ...

Elissa Dickson, Nathan Clay. 2024. "Eat up. Save Earth." Alternative proteins and the myth of inevitable sustainability. Journal of Rural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2024.103447

The emerging agri-food tech sector promises to solve myriad environmental problems. This article considers the sociotechnical imaginaries that animate these claims. We focus on plant-based meat and dairy substitutes, or 'alternative proteins' (APs). To examine how APs are constructed as environmental solutions, we analyzed marketing materials, sustainability reports, and interviews. Our study illustrates how environmental metr...