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This paper reports on a real money, economic experiment in which a broad group of ecological scientists were challenged to consider their own values within an economic framework, by considering whether to contribute financially (i.e., to donate) to support a global research initiative designed to investigate the implications of global change for grassland ecosystems. We use this experiment to illustrate the basic approach of economics as might apply to choices about and individual values for ecosystem services, particularly using an application to the potential to enhance scientific knowledge regarding grassland responses to the global distribution of nutrients. While scientists' choices and values were not significantly influenced by economic incentives embedded in the donation solicitation, donations were significantly associated with ecologists' specializations and career stages.

Communities in exurban areas increasingly rely on land preservation as a strategy to balance sprawling land development with maintaining environmental amenities. Based on a review of existing approaches for preserving land, we consider a conceptual model of environmental impact fees (EIFs) coupled with conservation payments for managing private land of ecosystem value. In this framework, conservation payments are intended to cost-effectively target fair market value compensation for heterogeneous land for preservation that sustains ecosystem health. EIFs serve as a financial instrument to augment conservation payments and to allow flexibility for landowners with private information to pursue development opportunities while accounting for environmental impacts. Using a bioeconomic model of nature-reserve design, we develop an empirical illustration of how to estimate the EIF of development damage to critical habitat in southern Rhode Island in an effort to preserve land as an environmental infrastructure that maintains ecosystem health.

The United States has been experiencing extensive rural land conversion associated with suburbanization and urban sprawl in many local areas. Among the social and economic issues associated with urban sprawl is the potential negative impact of rural land conversion and low-density development on local environmental amenities. With effectively irreversible residential growth, how could land managers maintain local ecosystem health while accommodating residential development? In this paper, we propose a landscape planning framework that integrates market-based land conservation programs, conservation subdivision, and landscape-level ecosystem management. We use an empirical example to illustrate the possibility of organization and application of conservation biology, urban planning, and market-based approaches to provide an ecologically sound community landscape at the urban–rural fringe.

Using the concept of PES, the Bobolink Project moves environmental economics research beyond measuring values and into the development of efficient markets to capture those values and maximize their ability to support ecosystem services (ES). Beginning in Rhode Island and then expanding to Vermont, the project employed a novel approach, where crowd-sourced pledges for ecosystem services were matched with landowner bids. Specifically, hayfield owners with nesting habitat for grassland birds were invited to participate in a uniform price auction to adopt “bird-friendly” haying practices in exchange for compensation. Simultaneously, private citizens were asked to engage in an innovative pledging process, inspired by Lindahl pricing, where funds would be used to compensate landowners. Resulting ES included viewscapes, flora, fauna and sounds generated from the contracted hayfields. After three pilot seasons supported by a research grant that resulted in 1089 acres of safe habitat for ground-nesting birds in Vermont, the project administration transitioned to Audubon Societies and expanded to include Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York. The success of the project suggests that this approach may be appropriate in other contexts where targeted ES include flagship species, and landowner-sellers can enter into contracts to deliver clearly-defined outcomes valued by donor-buyers.

The conversion of natural areas to human-dominated land uses results in loss, degradation, and fragmentation of wildlife habitat which often lead to species endangerment and local extinction. The risk of endangerment may be particularly acute for species that exist as metapopulations in which viability of the species is contingent upon dispersal of individuals among local sub-populations. This paper uses an optimization framework to investigate the problem of conserving metapopulations residing in areas at the urban–rural fringe. We compare the optimal allocation of preservation to outcomes of four other policy alternatives including the reserve-site-selection option that fully preserves habitat patches while allowing full development of the intervening dispersal matrix. In general, the optimal allocation includes some amount of preservation in both habitat patches and dispersal matrix, with the level of protection typically greater in habitat patches. The reserve-site-selection conservation option is optimal in only a few cases. Heterogeneity in terms of land use and landscape structure adds complexity to the optimal solution such that no one policy works well across all land units and in situations where the landscape structure is skewed, full protection of some land units and full development of others becomes more common.

Exurban areas have increasingly become zones of conflict as conservation and development compete for the same finite land resources. Conversion of natural areas to land dominated by human use results in loss, degradation, and fragmentation of wildlife habitat which often lead to species endangerment or even extinction. Recently, reserve site selection models have begun to integrate spatial attributes in order to design more compact and connected reserve networks that are thought to improve long-term species persistence. While these models are a good step forward to designing conservation reserve networks, they might not be adequate for use in exurban areas that consist of heterogeneous mosaics of land uses where habitat fragmentation already exists and not all parcels are available for preservation. This paper presents a species conservation framework that expands upon traditional reserve site selection models in three ways. First, because of the focus on exurban areas, the framework used here allows for land conversion within core habitat patches. Second, the framework provides a more robust assessment of connectivity among patches by accounting for land-use heterogeneity in the dispersal matrix. And third, the framework explicitly incorporates species population dynamics. We apply our conservation framework to the case of pond-breeding salamanders in an exurban community in Rhode Island, USA. Comparisons are made between the outcomes for uniform conservation policies and more flexible policies that accommodate ecological and economic heterogeneity. As expected, policies that offer more flexibility in the decision-making process are less costly in terms of foregone development. Conservation planners should consider core habitat patches, dispersal matrix, and spatial scale in their decision making. By not assessing the potential impact of dispersal barriers, reserve site selection models will result in conservation plans that may not protect species over the long term, particularly for species residing in highly fragmented landscapes such as those found in many exurban communities.

States and municipalities have committed over $24 billion in bond issues for land conservation in recent years, yet the structure of the land conservation industry and markets is poorly understood. Using a stated choice experiment survey, we examine the role of public access in willingness to pay (WTP) for coastal land conservation. We identify complex patterns in WTP, as related to level of access and to attitudes toward access and environmental protection. Our findings contribute to understanding market segments that may motivate heterogeneity in land conservation agents and that reveal opportunities to optimize conservation programs that serve heterogeneous populations.

This paper studies the preferences and willingness-to-pay of individuals for volunteer water quality monitoring programs. The study involves supporting water quality monitoring at two ponds in the state of Rhode Island. The paper uses both a hypothetical and a real-payment contingent valuation survey to directly measure individual preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for volunteer water quality monitoring at the two ponds. The overall results of the study suggest that hypothetical WTP is not statistically greater than real WTP, and that the average survey respondent is willing to support water quality monitoring on one of the two ponds. The study also finds that the specified purpose of water quality monitoring and certain socioeconomic characteristics of a respondent significantly affect the respondent's decision to support volunteer water quality monitoring.

“Ecosystem management” complicates forest management considerably. In this paper we extend the economic analysis of forestry to capture both the temporal and the spatial dimensions, allowing optimization of timber harvest decisions throughout an ecosystem. Dynamic programming simulations illustrate the implications for the simplest ecosystem, consisting of two forest management units. Results indicate that explicit recognition of ecological interactions, even between identical forest stands, may prescribe specialization through time and across space. Such spatial and temporal specialization leverages opportunities to provide ecosystem goods that may be foregone through reliance on “rules of thumb” derived from models that focus on the single stand. Key nerds: ecological economics, forest management, Hartman, ecosystem management economics Present-day ecosystem management represents a structural shift in the philosophy of resource management. Public forest management and policy objectives have developed from initial interest in commercial products to broad mandates for multiple-use, multiresource management (Behan), as managers balance the consumptive needs of society with a desire to maintain biological diversity and functions of ecosystems (Swallow). Ecosystem management complicates policy decisions considerably. Existing economic models of forest management are inadequate because they fail to account for the spatial relationships that determine many ecosystem functions. The traditional forest management approach is primarily based on the stand-level harvest models of Faustmann as ex

Resource managers often ignore economic information in decisions about recreational use of fish and wildlife resources. By evaluating within‐season harvest regulations, economists can identify strategies to improve recreational benefits without compromising management objectives represented in an annual harvest quota. Theoretical analysis raises a potential for bias in applied welfare analysis if regulations inefficiently trade off fishing quality and exogenous seasonality in anglers' demand. Simulations demonstrate that efficient regulations may limit daily harvests during the best fishing season or during the peak season of demand. Inadequate knowledge of recreationists' behavioral responses to quality and regulations currently limits policy assessments.

This paper develops a model that provides an objective framework for evaluating the concerns often cited by members of nearby communities and other state residents when potential sites for solid waste landfills are evaluated. An empirical version of the model is estimated using preference data collected in a paired comparison survey of Rhode Island residents, in which participants identify a preferred site and location for a landfill among two alternatives. The estimated model is used to assign scores to each characteristic describing the natural resources present at a site and the characteristics of the nearby community. The model estimates the proportion of voters who would choose each candidate site in a referendum that includes the complete set of alternatives. This simulated voting mechanism can be used to reduce a long list of technically desirable sites to a shorter list of sites that rank highly according to public preferences regarding natural resources and local community impacts.

This paper describes an approach to facility siting that ranks potential sites in terms of their social impacts. A contingent choice survey based on paired comparisons is used to construct a utility index to rank sites consistent with predicting results of a hypothetical referendum based on the attributes of the sites. The method is likely to be acceptable to public decision makers, since it is analogous to site scoring methods that have been commonly used. Indeed, our approach is currently being employed as part of a larger landfill site selection process in the state of Rhode Island.

[1] We set forth an argument for the integration of social science research with natural science and engineering research in major research infrastructure investments addressing water science. A program of integrated observation of water resources offers great opportunities to address several environmental “grand challenges” identified by the National Research Council, including climate variability, institutions and resource use, and land use dynamics, and their importance for hydrologic forecasting. We argue that such a program has the potential to advance both water science and the contributing disciplines. However, to realize this potential, it is essential to recognize that social science requires critical infrastructure funding on the scale of advanced research facilities in the natural sciences and engineering.

The rural public may not only be concerned with the consequences of land management; residents may also have systematic preferences for policy instruments applied to management goals. Preferences for outcomes do not necessarily imply matching support for the underlying policy process. This study assesses relationships among support for elements of the policy process and preferences for management outcomes. Preferences are examined within the context of alternative proposals to manage growth and conserve landscape attributes in southern New England. Results are based on (a) stated preferences estimated from a multi-attribute contingent choice survey of rural residents, and (b) Likert-scale assessment of strength of support for land use policy tools. Findings indicate general but not universal correlation among policy support indicators and preferences for associated land use outcomes, but also confirm the suspicion that policy support and land use preference may not always coincide. Key Words: choice experiment, conservation, land use control, policy support, rural development, stated preference The rural public may not only be concerned with the consequences of land management, they may also have systematic preferences for policy procedures applied to management goals (Abdalla, 2001; Johnston, Swallow, and Weaver, 1999; Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development, 2002; McLeod, Woirhaye, and Menkhaus, 1999). There is no guarantee respondents will support policies that are consistent with their stated preferences for land use outcomes. Indeed, respondents may possess strong preferences for management outcomes (e.g., wildlife habitat, public access) while being unwilling to accept the management processes required to generate those outcomes (Johnston, 2002). Despite this possibility, the literature provides little information indicating whether preferences for management outcomes are correlated with support for policies associated with those outcomes. Consider the example of a scenic, rural viewshed. Residents may have strong preferences for the preservation of scenic amenities, and indeed may be willing to pay to preserve these attributes. However, they may be unwilling to accept changes in zoning or alternative land use regulations required to ensure these outcomes (e.g., required setbacks, increases in required road frontage). Despite a positive willingness to pay (WTP) for the management outcome, a lack of support for associated management tools may preclude welfare-improving policy change. This study examines relationships among the rural public's support for the policy process and the public's preferences and goals for land management and conservation outcomes. Preferences are considered within the context of alternative proposals to manage residential growth and conserve landscape attributes in southern New England. Results are based on (a) stated preferences estimated from a multi-attribute choice survey of rural residents,1 and (b) a Likert-scale assessment of strength of support for 21 growth management and conservation tools. Data are drawn from the Rhode Island Rural Land Use Survey-a survey developed and designed by the authors to assess rural residents' tradeoffs among attributes of residential development and conservation. Description of the Model and Analysis The choice experiment section of the Rhode Island Rural Land Use Survey asked respondents to consider and choose between two alternative development options for a hypothetical, 400-acre tract of forested land located in their town of residence, an area comprising just over 1% of the land area in each of the four towns sampled. Each presented option could differ across a set of spatial and nonspatial attributes. Analysis of these results provides insight into preferences for development and conservation tradeoffs-or management outcomes. A subsequent section of the survey asked respondents to indicate their degree of support for, or opposition to, 21 different land use management policy options. …

[1] Efforts to value particular dimensions of environmental quality may misrepresent true social values if dimensions of environmental quality interact and researchers nonetheless seek to value single dimensions in isolation. While prior work illustrates that substitution among environmental improvements may occur, questions remain regarding the practical implications of such interactions for microlevel policy evaluation and whether similar effects occur when policies unavoidably include improvements in some resources and degradations in others. This paper identifies potential effects of preference interactions among watershed management components, with an emphasis on whether resource interactions can create substantial shifts in willingness to pay for policy changes.