Integrated Economic-Hydrologic Modeling for Examining Cost-Effectiveness of Wetland Restoration Scenarios in a Canadian Prairie Watershed

Economic Targeting of Agricultural Beneficial Management Practices to Address Phosphorus Runoff in Manitoba

“…Broadly speaking, this research contributes to the existing literature on incentive‐based policy instruments and informs the development of integrated models to direct policy implementation to address agricultural externalities. It reinforces previous findings (e.g., Yang et al ) in the literature revealing efficiency gains when targeting policy instruments to encourage the provision of public ecosystem goods and services on private agricultural lands. The results of this study support conclusions drawn by previous authors who have compared multiple targeting strategies to administer agri‐environmental subsidies and evaluated benefit–cost targeting as a cost‐effective targeting strategy.…”

“…This GIS database was used to estimate the pond implementation pattern and resulting P reduction in the La Salle subwatershed under each targeting strategy over the time period 2000-11 (hereafter referred to as the "study period"). While this approach is consistent with, and is informed by, the previously discussed work by Yang et al (2016), we focus exclusively on constructed water retention ponds located in, primarily, annually cultivated fields.…”

An experimental examination of target based conservation auctions

“…Given that virtually all wetlands in the watershed had been drained it was necessary to first identify where these drained areas are located. Yang et al (2009) identified suitable areas for restoration in the watershed using Lidar Digital Elevation Models to identify depression cells on the fields and then used this to generate depression polygons with areas from 0.1 to 7.0 acres. 2 This information determined that 31 of the 36 producers operating in the watershed had wetland basins that could be restored.…”

Development of an Integrated Modelling System for Evaluating Water Quantity and Quality Effects of Individual Wetlands in an Agricultural Watershed

“…Therefore, retention of existing wetlands and restoration of drained-lost wetlands are important for addressing these environmental problems. The entire Broughton's Creek watershed had been selected to study the effects of wetland loss and restoration on stream water quality using the SWAT model [4,5]. However, due to the SWAT's semi-distributed model structure, the assessment of wetland loss and restoration effects was conducted at a subbasin scale but not for individual wetlands.…”

“…The HEW function is achieved through calibrating wetland parameters including the fraction of the subbasin area that drains into wetlands, the volume of water stored in the wetlands when filled to their normal water level, the volume of water stored in the wetlands when filled to their maximum water level, the longest tributary channel length in the subbasin, and the Manning's n value for tributary and main channels. The HEW approach has the advantage of characterizing the non-linear functional relations between runoff and wetlands [3] and is reasonable for simulating hydrological processes of prairie pothole wetlands [4,5]. Different from the HEW approach, Mekonnen et al [6] proposed a probability distribution routine in the SWAT model to represent multiple wetlands within a subbasin.…”