Duration: 10/01/2002 to 09/30/2007

Administrative Advisor(s):

NIFA Reps:

Non-Technical Summary

Statement of Issues and Justification

Many federal and state agencies, as well as private landowners face difficulties in balancing economic feasibility with environmental quality. Federal agencies must justify decisions about changing recreation access or public land livestock grazing to protect wildlife habitat or restrictions on farm practices to improve water quality with benefit-cost analysis as part of their regulatory impact analysis. Agencies and the private landowners wish to know if particular changes are overly burdensome on ranchers, farmers and small businesses. This requires the comparison of the benefits to society of the increase in environmental or recreation quality with costs incurred by landowners or opportunity cost of foregone commodity production on federal lands. The objectives of this regional research project are designed to provide this type of benefit and cost information needed by federal, state and county decision makers and private landowners.

There is also widespread interest in obtaining estimates of the economic values of open space and agricultural land preservation by stakeholders as varied as city and county governments, state governments and federal agencies such as USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and USDA Economic Research Service.

With the adoption by federal land management agencies of ecosystem management as a guiding principle, there is a strong need for economic information on the benefits and costs of ecosystem management as compared to traditional multiple use management.

Part of the evidence of strong interest in these types of economic information by agencies is their frequent and extensive participation and attendance at the previous regional research meetings by USDA Economic Research Service, USDA Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees. In addition, research results from W133 have been quickly adopted by federal agencies. Examples include the USDA Forest Service use of W133 results as the basis for their Strategic Plan and Resource Planning Act values of recreation (Rosenberger of WV and Loomis of CO, 2000) and USDA and EPA reliance on W133 groundwater quality studies for formulating confined animal feeding operation regulations.

This project allows economies to be realized by each participating station and the federal agencies from eliminating duplication in development of statistical methods and survey designs. As detailed below, some stations will lead efforts to develop improved quantitative methods or surveys that will be applied by additional stations and the results compared. The coordinated research will allow stations that have expertise in quantitative methods (e.g., Nevada, Iowa) to provide state-of-the-art revealed preference models for use by other states (e.g., Colorado). States with survey development expertise (e.g., Maine) can provide survey templates that can be implemented by other participating states and the results compared.

Failure to undertake this regional research project will result in; (a) duplication of some research; and (b) failure to conduct the full breadth and depth of research proposed in this project by the stations individually due to limited financial resources. Failure to conduct this research will also leave many smaller federal agencies that do not have their own research programs without standardized surveys and reliable methods for estimating recreation and ecosystem benefits and costs. Failure to complete the research proposed here will make it difficult for federal agencies to complete required EIS's and regulatory impact analyses in a timely fashion using existing benefit and cost estimates that would be provided by this project.

The research project is feasible to conduct by participating stations as is evidenced from past successful collaborations and documented in our proceedings and agency publications. In particular, this project builds upon and extends models initially developed over the last five years which will now see wider application to other participating stations. This regional research project has assembled a complementary set of stations, some with expertise in statistical modeling (e.g., Iowa, Nevada, Utah), others with expertise in survey methodology (e.g., Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan) and others with theory expertise (e.g., California). As noted in the outreach section several members of participating stations have formal extension appointments so that dissemination of research results to stakeholders is ensured.

Related, Current and Previous Work

The previous W133 regional research project had four objectives. The project has fully accomplished the "Benefit Transfer for Ground Water Quality Programs" objective. This accomplishment is evidenced by publication of a book on this topic with the authors being members of this W133 Regional Research project. The book is entitled "The Economic Value of Water Quality" by John Bergstrom of University of Georgia, Kevin Boyle, University of Maine and Gregory Poe, Cornell University (being published by Edward Elgar Press). Individual chapters in the book include additional contributions by members of the W133 Regional Research project including Pennsylvania State University. The book deals with original research on valuing groundwater quality in several W133 member states and uses those individuals results to test the accuracy of benefit transfers from one state to another. Based on the book and other research that members have published in journals and in our proceedings (see in particular proceedings of the 1998, 1999 and 2000 meetings) we believe this objective has been fully met.

With regard to the other objectives, significant progress has been made on all three. These include: (1) valuing changes in recreation access; (2)benefits and costs of agro-economic policies; (3) valuing ecosystem management of forests and watersheds;

Valuing Recreation Access: The greatest progress has been made in valuing changes in recreation access. Here several important policy and methodological issues have been addressed. On the policy side, members of W133 (Shaw, Nevada) and other participants in W133 (New Mexico) have estimated the economic losses associated with restricting rock climbers access to Wilderness areas due to the prohibition on permanent fixed anchors (Grijalva, Berrens, Bohara and Shaw, 2001). On the methodology side, significant progress has been made on linking the site choice models and trip frequency models to better estimate the change in annual recreation benefits from a change in recreation access or recreation quality, and Herriges (Iowa) and Phaneuf (North Carolina) in the 1999 proceedings. Significant progress has also been made on linking revealed preference recreation demand models and stated preference data to improve the valuation of recreation quality changes (see Eiswerth, Englin, Fadali and Shaw--all Nevada in the 1999 proceedings-edited by Polasky, 1999). Much of the progress in linking revealed preference models of site choice and trip frequency is documented in a book edited by Herriges and Kling (both of Iowa) that contains chapters contributed by W133 members from California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina (see Herriges and Kling, 1999 for more details). Nonetheless, it was the consensus of the W133 regional researchers and federal cooperators that there is much more to be learned about how conditions of recreation access affect benefits and the quality of recreation experience,. Therefore we have refined the focus of this objective to build upon what has been accomplished over the last five years and to address the remaining issues in a coordinated fashion.

Benefits and Costs of Agroeconomic policies: Progress has been made in evaluating agroeconomic policies such as the Conservation Reserve Program on farm land prices, (see the 1999 proceedings paper by Lambert and Shultz-North Dakota), water quality and agricultural chemical usage and effects of livestock grazing in Wilderness areas (Shonkwiler and Englin of Nevada in the 2000 proceedings). Much of the progress that has been made on this objective is refinement in economic methodologies to include the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to allow for more site specific analysis. Some of the focus of this analysis has been on modeling of farmland conversion, the effect of open space policies on land values (McLeod, et al. (Wyoming)). Regulatory takings due to T&E species and other land use restrictions have also been initially explored. The benefits and costs of county open space programs for farmland preservation have just begun to be researched by the participating stations. These preliminary research results suggest we have a great deal more to learn on how agricultural policies like CRP, environmental regulations such as TMDL, ESA, etc., affect the well being of farmers, ranchers and other members of society. The consensus was to refine the focus of this objective and to include a new objective on the interface of open-space programs and agricultural land preservation.

Valuing Ecosystem Management of Forest and Watersheds: The progress on this objective has been substantial and has addressed what has turned out to be some very policy relevant topics, e.g., forest fires. With funding and participation from the USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station's Fire Lab, Colorado and Nevada jointly developed a survey that was applied to compare the effects of wildfires and prescribed fires on hikers and mountain bikers to several National Forests. The results were presented at the 2000 W133 meeting (Loomis et al., 2000) and further refinement of the analysis at the 2001 W133 meeting (Loomis (CO), Gonzalez-Caban (USDA Forest Service and Englin (NV) 2001). The other active area of research has been on evaluating watershed management with research by West Virginia (Fletcher, 1999), Michigan (Lupi, Hoehn and Christie, 1999). This has also been an area of methodological advances by building upon the lessons learned about using contingent valuation and conjoint analysis in the previous groundwater objective. While initial progress has been made in this area, the biological science underlying ecosystem management has advanced to the point where additional economic research is now possible. Our understanding of forest fire issues and the growing widespread prevalence of forest fire has led us to continue our research efforts on this objective. As detailed below, we have refined this objective to build upon the research results to date.

Related Regional Research Projects:
Reauthorization of this proposed regional research project will continue to fill an information need of state and federal agencies that is not met by any existing regional research project or coordinating committee. A search of the CRISS databases found no other projects dealing with economic valuation or recreation. The two most similar projects focus exclusively on water issues (W190) or focuses solely public land management issues. W190's focuses primarily on irrigated agriculture, not on instream flow, fisheries and water quality. Thus W190 complements W133, since W133 provides information on the non-market uses of water, with particular emphasis on the economic benefits of water quality improvements and instream flow. W192 focuses on rural communities and public lands. Besides their primary focus on rural communities W192 emphasizes ranch level economic analysis and the linkages between livestock production and community well being. Our focus is on non-traditional uses of ranch lands for ranch diversification such as big game hunting. Taken together the research proposed here for W133 and that of W192 provide complementary sets of analyses that provide decision makers with a more complete picture of public land management policies than can be provided by anyone project individually.

Objectives

1. Estimate the Economic Benefits of Ecosystem Management of Forests and Watersheds
   
2. Estimate the Economic Value of Changing Recreational Access for Motorized and Non-Motorized Recreation
   
3. Calculate the Benefits and Costs of Agro-Environmental Policies
   
4. Estimate the Economic Values of Agricultural Land Preservation and Open Space
   
5. 
   

Methods

Measurement of Progress and Results

Outputs

• A set of standardized recreation demand models that can be adopted by state and federal agencies for estimation of recreation benefits associated with changing public access and farmland management practices
• A set of standardized paper and Internet based surveys that can be used by other participating states and federal agencies for estimating the economic benefits of ecosystem management practices and ecosystem services
• Empirical estimates of economic benefits and costs of recreation access (both motorized and non-motorized), improving water quality, forest fire management policies and agricultural land preservation as open space that are applicable to participating stations and other states, particularly those in the West.
• These outcomes will be realized not only by publishing the demand models and empirical benefit and cost estimates in peer reviewed journal articles and in our proceedings, but will include copies of the paper surveys in the W133 proceedings. Further, each station that develops web based surveys and databases will provide the URL web address in the proceedings paper to ensure easy access to other member stations and state and federal agencies.

Outcomes or Projected Impacts

• Providing the most valuable mix of recreation opportunities to society (e.g., avoiding unnecessarily restricting motorized recreation, unless the corresponding benefits to non-motorized recreation users or other natural resources are significantly larger)
• Providing federal and state agencies with information on the benefits and costs of ecosystem management practices so that their land management plans will provide maximum benefits to people and taxpayers with due regard to protecting environmental quality for future generations
• Ensuring that environmental regulations and environmental programs aimed at farm and ranch lands provide economic benefits commensurate with the costs imposed on landowners.
• Achievement of these outcomes will reduce regulatory delay and may reduce unnecessary litigation over federal land management actions and farmland environmental quality regulations. If litigation does occur, the results of this research should provide federal and state agencies with information needed to assess the economic feasibility of their actions. The results of the revealed and stated preference modeling approaches described above will provide information on the total economic value of agricultural land preservation, open space and green space and how human population and land characteristics cause differences in value across regions. This information can help government agencies or private NGO land trusts to efficiently allocate scarce funds to protect land that results in the highest net value of public or private agricultural land, open space or green space protection programs. Maximizing the net value of the organization's programs (e.g., maximizing benefits over costs) is an important responsibility to the financial supporters and beneficiaries of the programs (e.g., taxpayers or private land trust benefactors), especially in a time of austere government and private NGO budgets.

Milestones

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Projected Participation

View Appendix E: Participation

Outreach Plan

The annual meeting provides opportunity for researchers to share their results with each other and with USFS, USDA ERS, U.S. BR, USFWS, NMFS and state agencies (e.g., CA Fish and Game). The papers from this meeting are published in an annual proceedings that is made available to all attendees. In addition copies are sent to each AES We plan to take advantage of the NIMSS web site to post our minutes of the meeting and proceedings papers. Joint research between member AES personnel and USFS personnel is expected to continue to be published through the USFS Research Station publication series and the USFS web sites.

Publications: Researchers at W133 will continue publishing in peer reviewed journals to disseminate results to other researchers and practitioners.

Presentations: The results of this research will also be presented by W133 members at professional meetings and workshops. For example, Colorado and Georgia will present W133 research to an annual training workshop for USFS employees. Ohio will utilize results of its research at the Ohio Annual Workshop on Benefit Cost Analysis presented to state and local policy makers. Similarly, Washington will present results of its forest and watershed analysis at the WSU Forest Ecosystem Management Course for Forest Managers. Dissemination of W133 research will also be facilitated through annual seminar series co-sponsored by Colorado and the USFS.

We also have extension personnel from Michigan, New York, Ohio, and Wyoming that will be participating in all objectives. In addition, W133 members have close working relationships with their extension colleagues. For example, Utah will disseminate results from valuing ecosystem management to its rangelands and public lands management extension specialist.

Organization/Governance

We follow the basic recommended Standard Governance for multistate research activities. This includes the election of a President, Vice-President who serves as President-elect, and a Secretary. All officers are elected for at least two-year terms to provide continuity. Administrative guidance will be provided by an assigned Administrative Advisor and a CSREES Representative.

Literature Cited

Attachments

Land Grant Participating States/Institutions

AL, CA, CO, CT, DE, GA, IA, IL, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, NC, ND, NH, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, TX, UT, WA, WI, WV, WY

Non Land Grant Participating States/Institutions