The survey of knowledge and willingness to pay of Khuzestan people's towards conservation of the Persian Fallow Deer (Dama dama mesopotamica) as endangered species

The objective of this study was to determine the level of Khuzestan people’s knowledge and willingness to pay towards the protection of the Persian Follow Deer (Dama dama mesopotamica (Brooke, 1875)) as endangered species, to recommend solutions that can improve management and protection of this species. In this descriptive and analytical study, 600 people from Khuzestan province were chosen via the clustered random sampling. Data was collected by a questionnaire with a reliability of 0.78, consisting of questions about the people’s demographics as well as their knowledge and practice regarding conservation of Persian Follow Deer was completed for all the study population through interviews. Subsequently, descriptive statistics, x2, and Mann-Whitney test and kruscal-wallis test were employed for analysis using SPSS Software (version 21). The findings of this study showed that, 67 percent of the people had poor awareness about endangered species of Persian Follow Deer and 82.8% of people were not interested in supporting the preservation of this species. On the other hand, there was a significant correlation between knowledge and sex, awareness and levels of education and knowledge and age (P