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This study aims to examine how organizations in the bio-based industry perceive risks and perform risk analysis within the capital investment decision-making process. More specifically, this study aims to assess sources of uncertainty commonly considered, identify tools and methods used for risk assessment, and understand how risk analysis is considered in capital budgeting. Eighty-six respondents were electronically surveyed on practices for capital investment risk analysis, including C-suite and upper management from different organization sizes and segments in the bio-based industry. It was found that some forms of risk analysis are utilized either in project assessment and/or for decision making by most respondents; however, qualitative and deterministic assessment practices dominate over probabilistic methods. In addition, risk assessment is most commonly performed in the later stages of a project, with less than 50% of adoption at the earlier stages. Overall, the main sources of uncertainties considered when performing risk assessment are financial, market and sales, and technology, with competition being considered mostly by upper management levels. Additionally, consistent with previous studies in other industry sectors, Internal Rate of Return, Return on Investment, and Net Present Value are the preferred financial indicators used to evaluate capital investments.

In investing in a new venture, companies aim to increase their competitiveness and generate value in scenarios where volatile markets, geopolitical instabilities, and disruptive technologies create uncertainty and risk. The biobased industry poses additional challenges as it competes in a mature, highly efficient market, dominated by petroleum-based companies, and faces significant feedstock availability and variability constraints, limited technological data, and uncertain market conditions for newly developed products. Thus, decision-making strategies and processes for these investment projects must consider solid risk estimation and mitigation measures. Focusing on the biobased industrial sector, this paper critically reviews state-of-the-art probabilistic and deterministic methodologies for assessing financial risk; discusses how a complete risk analysis should be performed; and addresses risk management, listing major risks and possible mitigation strategies. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Government agencies in the United States eradicated 10.3 million cannabis plants in 2010. Most (94%) of these plants were outdoor-grown, and 46% of those were discovered on federal lands, primarily on national forests in California, Oregon, and Washington. We developed models that reveal how drug markets, policies, and environmental conditions affect grow siting decisions. The models were built on a rational choice theoretical structure, and utilized data describing 2322 cannabis grow locations (2004–2012) and 9324 absence locations in the states' national forests. Predictor variables included cannabis market prices, law enforcement density, and socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental variables. We also used the models to construct regional maps of grow site likelihood. Significant predictors included marijuana street price and variables associated with grow site productivity (e.g., elevation and proximity to water), production costs, and risk of discovery. Overall, the pattern of grow site establishment on national forests is consistent with rational choice theory. In particular, growers consider cannabis prices and law enforcement when selecting sites. Ongoing adjustments in state cannabis laws could affect cultivation decisions on national forests. Any changes in cannabis policies can be reflected in our models to allow agencies to redirect interdiction resources and potentially increase discovery success.

The United States’ shares of global industrial roundwood production and derivative products have declined precipitously since the 1990s. We evaluate the extent of these declines compared with those of major producing countries from 1961 to 2013. We find that the US global share of industrial roundwood peaked at 28% in 1999 but by 2013 was at 17%, with the decline attributable to a combination of cyclical factors and long-run trends. Wood products output declines are linked to low construction levels, whereas paper’s decline is connected to the offshoring of US manufacturing and growth in electronic media. Prospects are for increased use of wood in construction as the housing market returns to long-run averages in the coming years. However, the paper sector is unlikely to recover to its 1990s levels of output, implying that it is unlikely that the United States will return to its historical highs in global market share of industrial roundwood production.

The recent rise of institutional timberland ownership has led to a significant change in the structure and conduct of the timber industry in the United States. In this study,we apply a two-period harvest model to assess the timber harvesting behavior of various landowners at the stand level by utilizing USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis data for nine southern states. Forest industry and institutional timberland owners were found to be more likely to conduct partial and final harvests than nonindustrial private forest landowners. Aggregately, Timberland Investment Management Organizations were found to be most, and timberlandReal Estate InvestmentTrusts to be least, price-responsive among ownership groups

Development of efficient forest wildfire policies requires an understanding of the underlying reasons behind forest fire occurrences. Globally, there is a close relationship between forest wildfires and human activities; most wildfires are human events due to negligence (e.g., agricultural burning escapes) and deliberate actions (e.g., vandalism, pyromania, revenge, land use change attempts). We model the risk of wildfire as a function of the spatial pattern of urban development and the abandonment/intensity of agricultural and forestry activities, while controlling for biophysical and climatic factors. We use a count data approach to model deliberately set fires in Galicia, N.W. Spain, where wildfire is a significant threat to forest ecosystems, with nearly 100,000 wildfires recorded during a thirteen-year period (1999e2011). The spatial units of analysis are more than 3600 parishes. Data for the human influences are derived from fine-resolution maps of wildlandeurban interface (WUI), housing spatial arrangements, road density, forest ownership, and vegetation type. We found wildfire risk to be higher where there are human populations and development/urbanisation pressure, as well as in unattended forest areas due to both rural exodus and a fragmented forest ownership structure that complicates the profitability of forestry practices. To better help direct management efforts, parameter estimates from our model were used to predict wildfire counts under alternative scenarios that account for variation across space on future landuse conditions. Policies that incentivize cooperative forest management and that constrain urban development in wildlands at hotspot fire locations are shown to reduce wildfire risk. Our results highlight the need for spatially targeted fire management strategies.

In this study we demonstrate how the notion of diversification can be used in broad-scale resource allocation for surveillance of invasive species. We consider the problem of short-term surveillance for an invasive species in a geographical environment. We find the optimal allocation of surveillance resources among multiple geographical subdivisions via application of a classical portfolio framework, which allocates investments among multiple financial asset types with uncertain returns in a portfolio that maximizes the performance and, by meeting the desired diversification targets, protects against errors in estimating the portfolio's performance. We illustrate the approach with a case study that applies a spatial transmission model to assess the risk of spread of the emerald ash borer (EAB), a significant pest in North America, with infested firewood that may be carried by visitors to campground facilities in central Canada. Adding the diversification objective yields an expected survey performance that is comparable with undiversified optimal allocation, but more importantly, makes the geographical distribution of survey priorities less subject to possible errors in the spread rate estimates. Overall, diversification of pest surveillance can be viewed as a viable short-term strategy for hedging against uncertainty in expert- and model-based assessments of pest invasion risk.

We assess exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) for U.S. and Canadian prices for oriented strand board (OSB), a structural wood panel product used extensively in U.S. residential construction. Because of its prominence in construction and international trade, OSB markets are likely sensitive to general economic conditions. In keeping with recent research, we examine regime-specific ERPT effects; we use a smooth transition vector error correction model. We also consider ERPT asymmetries associated with a measure of general macroeconomic activity. Our results indicate that during expansionary periods ERPT is modest, but during downturns, ERPT effects are larger. USDA-USFS [SRS 09-CA-11330143-023] Published version This research has been supported by USDA-USFS Cooperative Agreement No. SRS 09-CA-11330143-023. We appreciate the helpful comments provided by an anonymous referee and by seminar participants at the International Conference of Agricultural Economists in Vancouver, Canada, August 2018. Authors names appear in alphabetical order - senior authorship is shared. Public domain – authored by a U.S. government employee

Ten US states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis as of November 2018, and have adopted other policies regarding production, consumption, and the penalties associated with it. These policy changes may have affected illegal growing operations on national forests of the United States. Using data on the number of cannabis grow sites reported on 111 national forests between 2004 and 2016 together with information about state cannabis laws and when they were implemented, we find that recreational cannabis legalization is associated with decreased reports of illegal grow operations on national forests. Laws mandating minimum sentences for illegal cannabis possession or sales are associated with fewer reported grows, as is strict regulation of cannabinoid products. Taxes on sales have positive impacts on illegal growing, while law enforcement presence has a negative effect. Counterfactual simulations for 2016 quantify the magnitudes of these policy effects.

A process economic analysis of co-producing bioethanol and electricity (value prior to combustion) from mixed southern hardwood and southern yellow pine is presented. Bioethanol is produced by extracting carbohydrates from wood via autohydrolysis, membrane separation of byproducts, enzymatic hydrolysis of extracted oligomers and fermentation to ethanol. The residual solids after autohydrolysis are pressed and burned in a power boiler to generate steam and electricity. A base case scenario of biomass combustion to produce electricity is presented as a reference to understand the basics of bio-power generation economics. For the base case, minimum electricity revenue of $70–$96/MWh must be realized to achieve a 6–12% internal rate of return. In the alternative co-production cases, the ethanol facility is treated as a separate business entity that purchases power and steam from the biomass power plant. Minimum ethanol revenue required to achieve a 12% internal rate of return was estimated to be $0.84–$1.05/l for hardwood and $0.74–$0.85/l for softwood. Based on current market conditions and an assumed future ethanol selling price of $0.65/l, the co-production of cellulosic bioethanol and power does not produce financeable returns. A risk analysis indicates that there is a probability of 26.6% to achieve an internal rate of return equal or higher than 12%. It is suggested that focus be placed on improving yield and reducing CAPEX before this technology can be applied commercially. This modeling approach is a robust method to evaluate economic feasibility of integrated production of bio-power and other products based on extracted hemicellulose.

Mechanical treatment of vegetation is done on public and private lands for many possible reasons, including enhancing wildlife habitat, increasing timber growth of residual stands, and improving resistance to damaging pests. Few studies, however, have focused on the circumstances under which mechanical wildfire hazard reduction treatments can yield positive net economic wildfire benefits for landowners and managers. This study describes an economic assessment tool built from a representative area sample frame inventory of hazardous and potentially treatable timberland in twelve western states of the U.S. Base case parameter assumptions about values at risk, timber product prices, stand re-growth following treatment and wildfire impacts enable an initial estimate of the amount of timberland with positive discounted expected net economic benefits under four policy scenarios. These assumptions are then varied in a Monte Carlo simulation to provide some bounds of uncertainty around base case levels. A policy that allowed optimal prescriptions and product sales and which incorporates wildfire costs and benefits would result in more than 25% of treated area with positive net benefits. This is reduced somewhat if wildfire reduction costs and benefits are not considered, and reduced again to 14% when large trees are excluded from product sales. A policy that prohibits sale of products from these treatments results in less than 1% of area with positive net benefits.

In criminology, it is well understood that indicators of urban decay, such as abandoned buildings littered with broken windows, provide criminals with signals identifying neighborhoods with lower crime detection and apprehension rates than better maintained neighborhoods. Whether it is the resident population’s sense of apathy, lack of civic pride, or fear of confrontation that causes criminals to perceive an easy mark, it nevertheless emboldens them to strike. Previous research of wildland arson hints that broken windows (e.g., areas of criminal activity) are partly responsible for arson outbreaks within the wildland–urban interface. We model the incidence of wildland and non-wildland arson ignitions in Michigan from 2001 to 2005 as a function of constructed Broken Windows indices. Our results suggest that crime prevention and urban revitalization programs may be as valuable as fire suppression, fuels management, and law enforcement in limiting incidence and the damage from both wildland and non-wildland arson.

ARTICLE I NFO We assessed the impact on the world forest sector of a progressive elimination of illegal logging. The analysis compared predictions from 2007 to 2020, with and without a gradual reduction of illegally logged industrial roundwood from 2007 to 2011. A large part of the curtailment of timber supply due to the stoppage of illegal logging would be compensated by increased legal production incited by higher prices. As a result, without illegal logging the world annual production of industrial roundwood would decrease by no more than 1%, even though it would decrease by up to 8% in developing countries. World prices would rise by 1.5 to 3.5% for industrial roundwood and by 0.5 to 2% for processed products, depending on the assumption on illegal logging rates. World consumer expenditures for wood products and producer revenues would rise by 1 to 2% without illegal logging. World value added in forest industries would remain the same. However, the changes in consumer expenditures would be more than double the changes in producer revenues in countries dependent on illegally logged timber of domestic or foreign origin such as Indonesia and China. Symmetrically, changes in producer revenues would be almost twice the changes in consumer expenditures in countries with little illegal logging and efficient industries, such as Canada, Germany and the United States. Value added in forest industries would decrease most in countries with heavy illegal logging (12% in Indonesia and up to 9% in Brazil), and it would increase most in Germany, Canada (4%), and the United States (2%). Without illegal logging, the world forest inventory would increase slightly, as the increase in developing countries would more than compensate the decrease in developed countries.

Data from the Women's Health Initiative were used to quantify the relationship between the loss of trees to an invasive forest pest-the emerald ash borer-and cardiovascular disease. We estimated a semi-parametric Cox proportional hazards model of time to cardiovascular disease, adjusting for confounders. We defined the incidence of cardiovascular disease as acute myocardial infarction requiring overnight hospitalization, silent MI determined from serial electrocardiograms, ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, or death from coronary heart disease. Women living in a county infested with emerald ash borer had an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (HR=1.25, 95% CI: 1.20-1.31).

Administrative planning rules and legal challenges can have significant economic impacts on timber salvage programs on public lands. This paper examines the costs of the delay in salvage caused by planning rules and the costs associated with the volume reductions forced by legal challenges in one case study. The fires on the Bitterroot National Forest in the northern Rocky Mountains in the United States burned 124,250 ha in the summer of 2000, killing valuable timber. A proposal to salvage about 15% of the burned area, containing 0.8 million m 3 (176 million board feet) of the damaged timber, was challenged in court, resulting in a mediation plan salvage amount of 0.27 million m 3 (60 million board feet). Administrative planning requirements also delayed the initiation of salvage to 2003. Because timber decays following death and damage, the costs of delay can be quantified. We evaluate the costs of both reducing the salvage volume due to the litigation and the losses due to decay from the administrative delay. Simulations show that the court settlement plan created through legal challenge resulted in an $8.5 million loss to the U.S. treasury and an $8.8 million (65%) loss in net welfare under the base case market assumptions. The delay in salvaging the agreed upon salvage amount from 2001 to 2002 reduced revenues from salvage to the U.S. treasury by $1.5 million (25%) and potential welfare benefits by the same amount, under base case assumptions of market sensitivities to prices. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Wildfires create damages in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) that total hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the United States. Understanding how fires are produced in built-up areas near and within fire prone landscapes requires evaluating and quantifying the roles that humans play in fire regimes. We outline a typology of wildfire production functions (WPFs) and empirically estimate three broad classes of WPFs: fire event (ignitions), fire aggregate extent, and a combination function of fire effect and aggregate extent (an intensity-weighted aggregate extent model). Our case study is Florida, which contains an abundance of both wildland and human populations. We find that socio-economic variables play statistically significant roles in all three estimated production functions. At the county level, we find that population and poverty are usually positively related to annual wildfire area and intensity-weighted fire area, while unemployment is negatively related to ignitions, area, and intensity-weighted wildfire area. Poverty is found to be negatively related to wildfire ignitions, while the number of police are correlated with fewer ignitions. These results suggest that managers and decision makers should be aware of socio-economic variables and consider them in their wildland fire management decisions in the wildland–urban interface. Our results also emphasize the importance of including such variables in statistical models of wildfire risk in the WUI.

The United States’ share of global industrial roundwood production has declined since the 1990s. We reviewed data from 1961-2013 to evaluate the extent of this decline for industrial roundwood and derived secondary forest products compared to other major producing countries. We find that the U.S. global share of industrial roundwood peaked at 28 percent in 1999 but then declined to 17 percent by 2012. We attribute the decline to a combination of cyclical factors, most notably the decline in U.S. construction, and long-term decline in U.S. paper manufacture that is connected to a reduction in the size of the U.S. manufacturing sector and waning demand for paper used in media. Prospects are for increased use of wood in construction as the housing market returns to long-run averages in the coming years, which should push the U.S. share to over 20 percent. However, the use of wood by the paper sector is not likely to experience a significant recovery, implying that it is unlikely that the United States will return to its 1990s levels of global market share in industrial roundwood production. Timber demands—not timber supplies—currently limit production growth in the United States. Increased wood demand by the construction sector might occur with changes in building codes, allowing for taller and larger wood-frame construction. The growth in wood use by the energy sector is another emerging prospect.

Deriving from original work under the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy completed in 2011, this report summarizes the state of knowledge regarding the underlying causes and the role of wildfire prevention efforts on all major categories of wildfires, including findings from research that have sought to model wildfire occurrences over fine and broad spatial and temporal scales. The report also describes a conceptual model of wildfire ignitions, which is designed to provide a modeling framework for analysts who seek to better understand wildfire ignition processes or develop statistical models that can predict wildfire occurrences across any spatial or temporal scale.

We used the Economics of Biomass Removals model to evaluate the required treatment acreages, volumes removed, treatment costs and product revenues from national forest and other ownerships. We used three distinct treatment prescriptions to achieve two hazard reduction goals for treatable timberlands in the Western United States. The two hazard reduction goals were to maintain current hazard levels over 10 years, and to reduce hazard levels by 20 percent over 10 years. We also simulated one treatment prescription on national forest timberland only in order to evaluate the effect of requiring a minimum level of treatment in each State. These simulations show that costs and revenues differ by intensity of the hazard reduction goal and by treatment prescription. They show that uneven-aged treatment prescriptions tend to be more expensive than thin-from-below prescriptions for accomplishing hazard reduction goals. Uneven-aged prescriptions, however, yield greater timber product volumes and values for landowners, offsetting the higher costs. On the other hand, in situations without wood product markets, thin-from-below prescriptions could be a better option because of the lower net costs.

It is crucial for fire prevention policies to assess the spatial patterns of human-started fires and their relationship with geographical and socioeconomic aspects. This study uses fire reports for the period 1988-2006 in Galicia, Spain, to analyze the spatial distribution of human-induced fire risk attending to causes and underlying motivations associated with fire ignitions. Our results show that there are four distinctive types of municipalities in this region according to the incidence of intentional agricultural-livestock fires, pyromaniacal behavior, negligence, and unknown causes. They highlight that study of the spatial properties of the human causes and motivations of forest fire activity can provide valuable information for detecting the presence of non-random clusters of fires of various causes in particular locations, where fire management planning should be evaluated more in depth. © 2010 WIT Press.

Public outreach and wildfire education activities have been shown to limit the number of unintentional human-caused ignitions (i.e., ‘accidental’ wildfires). Such activities include the airing of public service announcements, visiting with homeowners in at-risk areas, distributing informative brochures and flyers, hosting of public forums (with presentations), and facilitating community sponsored neighborhood hazard assessments. By limiting the number of ignitions, prevention entirely avoids costs and losses related to fire suppression (initial attack) and property damage. In this paper, we show that the benefits of wildfire prevention education activities carried out in the State of Florida, USA, far outweigh their costs. We also report how the return on wildfire prevention education investment in that State varies—i.e., the effectiveness of these programs varies—with many exogenous factors, including weather, season, and recent wildfire history and fuels management activities. To illustrate how this effectiveness variation could be exploited to increase returns to money spent on prevention, we explore the optimal timing of wildfire prevention activities. Optimal timing of wildfire prevention education spending is defined as the spending allocation over time that yields the lowest wildfire-induced cost plus net value change to society. We find that, for Florida, the optimal (monthly) timing of prevention activities can be forecasted by exploiting the relationships between prevention effectiveness and fire weather measures, which vary predictably within the year.

With expenditures to suppress wildfires in the United States increasing rapidly during the past couple of decades, fire managers, scientists, and policy makers have begun an intense effort to develop alternative approaches to managing wildfire.

The wildland fire management organization of the United States Forest Service (USFS) operates under policy and budget legacies that began nearly -100 years ago and a forest fuel situation that is all too current. The confluence of these three factors contributes to increased burning and firefighting costs for the agency, and increased concern from both the U.S. Congress and the public. Historically, the 10-year moving average of suppression expenditures has been used in USFS annual budget requests to Congress. But in a time when fire activity and costs are steadily rising, the IO-year moving average budget formula has translated into shortfalls in available suppression funds nearly every year since the mid-1990s. When the budgeted amount is insufficient, the agency continues to suppress fires by reallocating funds from other land management programs and by making subsequent requests to Congress for additional funding. A recent report from the U.S. General Accounting Office (renamed the Government Accountability Office in 2004) recommended a reevaluation of the budgeting system for wildfire suppression expenditures by the federal land management agencies (U.S. GAO, 2004). While many of the issues and critiques made by GAO are beyond the control of the agencies, the USFS has explored alternatives to current practices used in developing out-year budget requests for emergency fire suppression. We have two primary objectives in th is chapter. First, we seek to evaluate candidate forecast models of wildfire suppression expenditures. These time series models are constructed to allow suppression budget forecasts up to 3 years in advance of a coming fire season. These models are evaluated for their suit­ ability for budget documents presented to Congress. The structure of estimated models highlights the importance of accounting for intertemporal dynamics and stochasticity in wildfire suppression expenditures. Second, we demonstrate a method from the forecasting literature that quantifies some of the factors poten­ tially important in choosing among alternative models. The method applies loss functions to errors in forecasts, and our comparisons are between the 10-year moving average and our estimated time series models.

Increasing severity of recent wildfires, storms, pest outbreaks, and biological invasions has intensified concern among governmental agencies, private enterprises, and the general public regarding the future of forest resources. Economic analysis can help decision-makers understand the causes and consequences of forest disturbances, as well as evaluate trade-offs, and set priorities. It is the premise of this book that similarities existing among forest disturbances permit the development of a unified framework for economic analysis. This book sketches out how this framework could be constructed, provides an overview and summary of current research in the economics of forest disturbances, and illustrates how economic theory and empirical methods can be applied to address specific disturbances. From an economic perspective, a forest disturbance can be defined as an event that interrupts or impedes the flow of goods and services provided by forest ecosystems that are desired by people. This definition parallels the ecological definition of a natural disturbance as " ... any relatively discrete event in time that disrupts ecosystem, community, or population structure and changes resources, substrate availability, or the physical environment" (White and Pickett 1985, p. 7). Although timber harvesting and land use change are forest disturbances according to this definition, in this book we address large-scale natural disturbances that can be mediated and modified by human actions. Examples of such large-scale natural forest disturbances occurring during the past century include the chestnut blight which largely eliminated chestnut trees from hardwood forests in the eastern United States, Hurricane Katrina which blew down large swaths of forest in the United States Southeast, and the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park and surrounding forest ecosystems that burned more than onequarter million hectares. Catastrophic disturbances affect both public and private land, and the management interventions applied to mitigate damages will vary depending on the

Natural disturbances in forests are driven by physical and biological processes. Large, landscape scale disturbances derive primarily from weather (droughts, winds, ice storms, and floods), geophysical activities (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, even asteroid strikes), fires, insects, and diseases. Humans have always been affected by these processes and have invented ways to harness such processes or manipulate vegetation to enhance the values obtained from nature or reduce their negative impacts on human societies. For example, humans have cleared brush using fire to reduce pest! populations and encourage forage for animals (Pyne 1995). Historically, humans have relied on traditions, rules of thumb, and trial and error to predict how their actions may affect disturbance probabilities and characteristics. More recently, economic assessment tools have helped gauge the consequences of natural disturbances on forests . As the availability of science, technology, and environmental data have improved, scientists and economists have been able to quantify disturbances as production processes that emanate from a combination of biological, physical, and (or) human-initiated inputs. Ecologists have long recognized that disturbances lead to changes in ecological corrmlUnities, which subsequently affect human societies. Economists, on the other hand, have been focused on understanding how humans can intervene to alter both the frequency and severity of natural disturbances. Improving scientific and economic assessment tools, and experience using them, have in turn helped us to appreciate the many consequences of natural disturbances. The objectives of this chapter are to (1) define disturbances and their stages, (2) discuss how mathematical expressions of disturbance processes, disturbance production functions, may differ from the production functions defined in neoclassical economics, (3) identify the stages of disturbances, (4) provide a typology of production functions relevant to forest

Research shows that some categories of human-ignited wildfires may be forecastable, owing to their temporal clustering, with the possibility that resources could be predeployed to help reduce the incidence of such wildfires. We estimated several kinds of incendiary and other human-ignited wildfire forecast models at the weekly time step for tribal land units in the United States, evaluating their forecast skill out of sample. Analyses show that an autoregressive conditional Poisson model of both incendiary and non-incendiary human-ignited wildfires is more accurate out of sample compared with alternatives, and the simplest of the autoregressive conditional Poisson models performed the best. Additionally, an ensemble of these and simpler, less analytically intensive approaches performed even better. Wildfire hotspot forecast models using all model types were evaluated in a simulation mode to assess the net benefits of forecasts in the context of law-enforcement resource reallocations. Our analyses show that such hotspot tools could yield large positive net benefits for the tribes in terms of suppression expenditures averted for incendiary wildfires but that the hotspot tools were less likely to be beneficial for addressing outbreaks of non-incendiary human-ignited wildfires.

The 21st century continues a trend of rapid growth in both international trade of forest products and a concern for forests. These two trends are connected. Forces causing trade growth are linked to the loss of native forest resources in some countries and the accumulation of nonnative forest resources in other countries. Factors increasing trade include relaxation of trade barriers, income growth, and improvements in wood growing, harvest, and manufacturing technologies. But environmental concerns are increasing as consumer preferences change, and as native forests recede and plantation forests become more prominent.

We describe how two important tools of wildfire management, wildfire prevention education and prescribed fire for fuels management, can be coordinated to minimise the combination of management costs and expected societal losses resulting from wildland fire. We present a long-run model that accounts for the dynamics of wildfire, the effects of fuels management on wildfire ignition risk and area burned, and the effects of wildfire prevention education on the ignition risk of human-caused, unintentional wildfires. Based on wildfire management activities in Florida from 2002 to 2007, we find that although wildfire prevention education and prescribed fire have different effects on timing and types of fires, the optimal solution is to increase both interventions. Prescribed fire affects whole landscapes and therefore reduces losses from all wildfire types (including lightning), whereas wildfire prevention education reduces only human-caused ignitions. However, prescribed fire offers a longer-term solution with little short-term flexibility. Wildfire prevention education programs, by comparison, are more flexible, both in time and space, and can respond to unexpected outbreaks, but with limited mitigation longevity. Only when used together in a coordinated effort do we find the costs and losses from unintentional wildfires are minimised.

The U.S. conservation organizations, together with the U.S. scientific and professional societies most closely allied to natural resources, are termed the “conservation sector.” This sector was surveyed to determine the volumes, destinations, objectives, and decisionmaking criteria for international travel. The resulting profile indicates a small, high-cost, and immature market segment driven mainly by the desire to provide educational and professional experiences.