Species Distributions, Land Values, and Efficient Conservation

Abstract

Efforts at species conservation in the United States have tended to be opportunistic and uncoordinated. Recently, however, ecologists and economists have begun to develop more systematic approaches. Here, the problem of efficiently allocating scarce conservation resources in the selection of sites for biological reserves is addressed. With the use of county-level data on land prices and the incidence of endangered species, it is shown that accounting for heterogeneity in land prices results in a substantial increase in efficiency in terms of either the cost of achieving a fixed coverage of species or the coverage attained from a fixed budget.

State‐level variation in conservation investment by a major nongovernmental organization

“…Taken together, these results suggest a richer understanding of conservation effort stands to be gained by analyzing investment strategies along both dimensions (area and dollars invested). Past habitat conservation strategies have been suggested to be largely opportunistic (Ando et al 1998;Scott et al 2001). However, our analyses suggest a generally strategic signal in TNC's investment portfolio.…”

Dynamic reserve site selection

“…We feel that the analysis of budget constraints in dollar terms, rather than in terms of number of sites, is an important next step in the analysis. Ando et al (1998) and Polasky et al (2001) have shown that budget constrained solutions that incorporate difference in land costs across sites often lead to distinctly different priorities than do site constraint solutions that ignore such differences.…”

“…Applications of these methods to find optimal solutions to the reserve site selection problem include Cocks and Baird (1989), Saetersdal et al (1993), Church et al (1996), Kiester et al (1996), Csuti et al (1997), Pressey et al (1997), Ando et al (1998), Snyder et al (1999), and Polasky et al (2001).…”

Buyouts and Agglomeration Bonuses in Wildlife Corridor Auctions

“…Hence, it is implicitly assumed that the conservation planner has full information on the (opportunity) costs of procuring land from different landowners, and that all landowners will participate (cf. Ando et al 1998, Williams 1998, Williams and Snyder 2005, Conrad et al 2012. Bamière et al (2013) do assume asymmetric information with respect to the landowners' opportunity costs, but they do not allow for voluntary participation in their auction model.…”