The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: Natural Resources International Fellowship ( Bentham-Moxon Trust ( ), and Bangor University financially supported this work. Received: SeptemAccepted: FebruPublished: March 14, 2012Ĭopyright: © 2012 Williams et al. PLoS ONE 7(3):Įditor: Karen Freeman, Madagascar Fauna Group, United States of America However, in many situations other barriers to cultivation, such as access to seeds or appropriate markets, will need to be addressed.Ĭitation: Williams SJ, Jones JPG, Clubbe C, Gibbons JM (2012) Training Programmes Can Change Behaviour and Encourage the Cultivation of Over-Harvested Plant Species.

We suggest that training programmes can have a long lasting effect on individuals and can change behaviour. Technical knowledge and perceived behavioural control (along with socio-economic variables such as forest ownership and age) were predictors of whether individuals cultivate xaté. Those who had been trained had higher levels of technical knowledge about xaté cultivation and higher belief in their ability to cultivate it while training was not associated with differences in attitudes or subjective norms. Whilst accounting for socioeconomic variables, we investigate the influence of training upon these behavioural predictors and examine the factors that determine whether people adopt cultivation of a novel species. Five years after the training programme ended, we surveyed untrained and trained individuals focusing on four potential predictors of behaviour: technical knowledge, attitudes (what individuals think about a behaviour), subjective norms (what individuals perceive others to think of a behaviour) and perceived behavioural control (self assessment of whether individuals can enact the behaviour successfully). We assessed the impact of a training programme aiming to encourage cultivation of xaté ( Chamaedorea ernesti-augusti), an over-harvested palm from Central America. Training programmes are therefore used to increase technical knowledge to encourage people to adopt cultivation. Cultivation of wild-harvested plant species has been proposed as a way of reducing over-exploitation of wild populations but lack of technical knowledge is thought to be a barrier preventing people from cultivating a new species.

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