The Socio-Ecological Transformation of Private Lands and the Future of Wildlife Management Under Amenity Migration: A Call for Action

This paper addresses the critical intersection of demographic shifts and private land conservation, with a focus on the implications for wildlife management in rural private ecosystems. As private land ownership, resulting from the phenomenon of amenity migration, continues to fragment and diversify, understanding how these emerging landowners interact with wildlife and engage in management practices is essential to achieving large-scale conservation outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on this understudied intersection of literatures through a review that synthesizes existing scholarship, identifies critical gaps, and outlines opportunities for future research and institutional response. Building on socio-ecological systems perspectives, our results showcase four themes where wildlife is mentioned in the amenity migration literature, yet wildlife is rarely treated as a managed social-ecological system in this literature. Our call for action argues that the implications of amenity migration on wildlife management extend beyond individual landowners to include institutional systems, shifting com-munity dynamics, and new patterns of land use that together shape the conditions under which wildlife can persist.