The research activities of this project will address the direct and indirect influences that waterfowl hunters have on wetland and waterfowl conservation. Waterfowl hunters are a core constituency of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP), and have been supporters of wetland and waterfowl conservation through a variety of activities, including purchasing the Canadian Wildlife Habitat Conservation Stamp. However, recent evidence (e.g., Harshaw, 2018; Sainsbury et al., 2025) suggests that traditional measures of conservation supporting activities (e.g., pro-environmental behaviours) may not capture the meanings of conservation that waterfowl hunters hold, nor the activities that waterfowl hunters participate in that support conservation. The validity and reliability of how conservation is currently measured among waterfowl hunters poses issues for initiatives that seek to characterize and describe waterfowl hunters’ engagement in conservation. Understanding what conservation means and entails for waterfowl hunters are fundamental questions that inform the framing and assumptions of how their conservation engagement is measured and reported. Having a more complete understanding of the different ways that waterfowl hunters think about and engage in conservation will result in valid and reliable measures of waterfowl hunters’ direct contributions to conservation (e.g., the activities that the participate in) and to indirect influences (e.g., information that they communicate through their social networks). A better understanding of what conservation means to Canadian waterfowl hunters will provide better measures of conservation engagement that will support NAWMP partners’ initiatives to sustain and enhance wetlands and waterfowl populations, and allow them to more effectively target efforts to sustain waterfowl hunters’ support for conservation.