Abstract
Access is critical in all relationships between people and nature. As such, access is a socially relevant concept to comprehend public relationships and benefits from natural resources. Social scientists, however, comprehend and express access in diverse ways, contributing to the term's conceptual plurality. Despite the plurality, research in natural resources has given no explicit attention to the humanistic nature of access. Through this dissertation research, I sought to both comprehend the social meaning of access and to provide clarity to the term’s conceptual plurality in social science. First, through a conceptual scoping review, I documented how interdisciplinary sciences in United States based fish and wildlife contexts approach the term. Through mixed methods analysis I untangled the concept of access through its relations between users and socio-physical systems. Second, I explored experiential and informational factors that influence Idahoans’ beliefs about change in access for their outdoor activities. With survey data and a proportional odds model, I found that Idahoans’ direct experiences with access change are the most impactful factor in belief formation. Third, I described access as a lived and embodied experience for Idaho hunters. For this population, access is a process of negotiating a socio-physical landscape to realize autonomous hunting opportunities. Together, these findings point towards a concept of access rooted in social reality that represents a mediating process between benefits and resources. Access as a process establishes conceptual boundaries of the term, which help differentiate it from other neighboring concepts. Further, access is not static feature of a landscape; it is something people do.