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Small Natural Features (SNFs) are analogous to keystone species in that they have ecological importance that is disproportionate to their size. Thus the recognition and management of SNFs can be an efficient way to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. In particular, while the size of SNFs can engender threats (e.g., they are often overlooked and are relatively vulnerable to complete destruction), small size also leads to special conservation opportunities (e.g., integration with resource uses such as forestry or fisheries). Commonly, SNF conservation begins with education and inventory to form a foundation for appropriate, targeted protection and/or sustainable management. However, in cases of severe degradation or loss, more intensive activities such as restoration or creation may be required. Diverse approaches to conservation action are possible. For example, sometimes SNF conservation is undertaken incidentally to other efforts or on a voluntary basis; sometimes it involves substantial economic incentives or restrictive regulations. In general, the required investment for SNF conservation is likely to be smaller than that for larger areas, with disproportionate benefits given the substantial spatio-temporal influence of these features. In practice, conservation of SNFs should be complementary to traditional, larger-scale, forms of conservation by fostering creative, constructive efforts to conserve some seemingly minor features; features that have previously unknown or unappreciated roles critical to their broader ecosystems and to biodiversity.

This paper surveys the literature on pollinator declines and related concerns regarding global food security. Methods for valuing the economic risks associated with pollinator declines are also reviewed. A computable general equilibrium (CGE) approach is introduced to assess the effects of a global catastrophic loss of pollinators. There appears to be evidence supporting a trend towards future pollinator shortages in the United States and other regions of the world. Results from the CGE model show economic risks to both direct crop sectors and indirect non-crop sectors in the economy, with some amount of regional heterogeneity.

Development in rural-urban fringe communities is increasing with the potential to damage healthy ecosystems and endanger the long-term persistence of resident flora and fauna. The environmental impacts of development include loss, degradation, and fragmentation of wildlife habitat, increased air and water pollution, increased soil erosion, and decreased aesthetic appeal of the landscape. Current land use policies rarely incorporate features of landscape-scale ecosystem health. This paper develops a model that combines ecological and economic constructs to determine the optimal allocation of development across a spatially-realistic landscape. The land allocation model establishes links between long-term metapopulation persistence and development through an ecosystem constraint. A social planner seeks to maximize the benefits of development while guaranteeing a certain likelihood of long-term metapopulation persistence across the landscape that accounts for the changes to habitat patches and species dispersal success brought about by development. It is shown that in an economically homogeneous environment, the allocation of land to developed uses is determined solely by ecological elements (landscape structure and species parameters). The amount of land remaining in each habitat patch is the same regardless of their initial sizes or initial levels of development. The cost to society of meeting the ecological objective for metapopulation persistence depends on the land rent, the level of the safe-minimum-standard, the area of the landscape management unit, the distance between habitat patches, the dispersal ability of the focal species, and the species-specific area scaling parameter. Cost is not affected by the initial conditions of the habitat patches or the amount of development that has already taken place in the landscape management unit. When heterogeneity is introduced, the allocation of land is also determined by the differential land rents. More development occurs in habitat patches and landscape management units with higher land rents compared with the homogeneous case. In the heterogeneous land use case, where different land uses have different intensities of damages, the development intensity parameters are factors in the solution with more development occurring in areas zoned for less intensive land uses and the cost to society of achieving the ecological objective is a function of initial habitat patch sizes.

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.

Newer residents of rural, urban-fringe communities are often assumed to have preferences for the development and conservation of rural lands that differ from those of longer-term residents. The existing literature offers little to verify or quantify presumed preference shifts. This paper provides a systematic, quantitative examination of whether stated preferences for development and conservation tradeoffs differ according to length of residency in a rural community, and explores implications of these findings for assumptions regarding development and conservation preferences. Results are based on stated preferences estimated from a multi-attribute contingent choice survey of Rhode Island rural residents. Heterogeneity-according to length of town residency-is incorporated using Lagrangian Interpolation Polynomials. This approach models the influence of policy attributes as a polynomial function of residence time, thereby allowing estimated coefficient values to vary as a continuous function of residence duration.

This paper reports on a contingent choice study in which residents of a rural Rhode Island community were asked to express their preferences for packages of growth management outcomes, where surveys presented both spatial and non-spatial attributes of growth management outcomes. Survey results provide insight on the extent to which estimated willingness to pay (WTP) for marginal changes in specific landscape features or land uses may be influenced by spatial considerations. Results also characterize the potential impact of spatial context on public preferences and WTP for coordinated packages of growth management outcomes. Keywords: Land Use, Spatial, Contingent Choice, Growth Management, Economics, Valuation