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This paper estimates the effect of attractive natural space on Dutch residential property prices. We operationalize attractive natural spaces by combining land use data with unique data on the perceived attractiveness of natural spaces. In our main results, the effect of attractive natural space on property prices falls from 16.0% for properties within 0.5 km, to 1.6% for properties up to 7 km away. Our findings advance existing hedonic studies by verifying that economic benefits of living near natural space extend over a larger distance. This has important implications for public policy regarding investment in natural space near residential areas.

Instability in smallholder farmers' income in developing countries due to unstable farm prices has been a challenge for farmers and agricultural policymakers over the years. Sustained price stabilization mechanisms are mostly lacking. In some countries, output price support has been initiated to stabilize incomes and as an incentive to enhance farmer investment and boost production. This paper investigates the impacts of output price support on smallholder farmers' income in Ghana, using a household and farm-level data from 252 beneficiaries and 268 non-beneficiaries of buffer stock operations in Ghana. We applied the Coarsened Exact Matching and Propensity Score Matching methods to balance the data among the two groups. We estimate the smallholder farmer income effect from participating in buffer stock operations by combining the matching methods in a regression framework. The results affirm that buffer stock operations increase the incomes of participating smallholder farming households by at least 12%, providing evidence that output price support via buffer stocks is a critical tool for improving incomes and alleviating poverty among farmers in Ghana. The results further indicate that age, gender, access to market, and use of extension services, as well as transport and packaging costs, drive the participation of smallholder farmers in the buffer stock operations in Ghana. The findings are relevant to local policymakers and development partners who develop tailored interventions to stabilize and increase income for smallholder maize farmers in Ghana.

Methods to map nature-based recreation are increasingly used, especially in ecosystem services research and practice. Researchers that map nature-based recreation beyond local scales, however, have relied much on physical attributes, e.g. land cover and topography. In such instances the recreational potential of land is modeled based on expert judgement and not on public preferences. Participatory mapping data is based on public preferences and as such can be used to improve proxy-based methods to map the recreational potential of land. In this paper, we use data from an online mapping survey (the Hotspotmonitor/Greenmapper) to spatially analyze the recreational potential of land. We employed point pattern analyses to 1) investigate which physical attributes contribute to the recreational potential of land, at both a regional and a national scale, and 2) how preferences for such attributes differ between respondents from distinct geographical regions. We find that interregional differences, whereas prominent at the regional scale, are small at national scale, suggesting there is a shared understanding of what places are 'hotspots' for recreation within the Netherlands. These hotspots, however, are difficult to map using physical attributes alone. Discussing these discrepancies, our paper provides insights that contribute to a better understanding and mapping of the recreational potential of land.

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