Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Objective 1: Evaluate Natural Resource Management Decisions and the Effects of Climate Change to Understand Associated Welfare Impacts

Colorado State University

• Jesse Burkhardt entered into a cooperative agreement with the US Forest Service. The project is run by Sonja Kolstoe, another W5133 member and is broadly about understanding the relationships between wildfires and community drinking water systems. The project is large and spans multiple universities and includes several other W5133 members including Steve Dundas (Oregon State), and Bryan Parthum (EPA).
• Since 2020, Jude Bayham have advised the Colorado State Forest Service Forest Restoration and Wildfire Risk Mitigation Grant Program on implementing a grant match reduction requirement for communities with “fewer economic resources” as specified in HB 20-1057. Jude Bayham developed the Wildfire Social Vulnerability Index, which is documented here (https://jbayham.github.io/CSFS_WSVI/report.html). In 2023, Jude Bayham updated the spatial layer based on new census data and conducted additional robustness analysis (https://jbayham.github.io/CSFS_WSVI/update_2023.html).
• Over the past year, Jude Bayham has made progress on several wildfire management projects. Jude Bayham contributed to a project focused on quantifying the effectiveness of different suppression strategies. Jude and collaborators have compiled data on fire spread and severity and merged it with hand- and machine-built fire line as well as retardant drops. This will guide both land and wildfire management strategies, and it will also enable economic analysis of wildfire management capacity. Several manuscripts are at different stages of development. Jude and colleagues plan to submit two manuscripts in 2024.
• Jude Bayham contributes to a project assessing how equitable the use of airtankers are in the western US. Jude Bayham and collaborators find no evidence that airtankers are used more or less in disadvantaged communities. Jude Bayham and collaborators plan to submit this manuscript in 2024. This work was presented at the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics Annual Meeting.
• We worked on understanding the effects and challenges of incentivizing practice changes in agriculture as a climate change mitigation and adaptation strategy. Next, we received a grant and began work to evaluate the economic impacts of inland flooding. This includes an analysis of how people respond to floods and flood information. We also worked on a project related to weather shocks, forests, and food security.

Louisiana State University

• Current activity of researchers at LSU and Mississippi State is developing a survey intended for commercial shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico to understand their willingness to use new bycatch reduction devices. This survey will launch in late spring/early summer 2024 with results expected in fall 2024.

North Carolina State University

• Collaboratively with Dr. Craig Landry of UGA, we produced benefit estimates for beach trips in the Southeastern US that can be used USACE and other agencies for assessing recreational benefits from policy interventions such as beach enrichment.

Oregon State University

• David Lewis collaborated with the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station to develop a land-use change econometric model for the conterminous United States to estimate the probabilities of change between cropland, pasture, forests, rangeland, and urban development. This joint research between Lewis and the USDA Forest Service is notable for empirically estimating the effects of climate on land‐use change across the conterminous United States and uses the empirical model to simulate the effects of a range of future climate change scenarios on the allocation of land to forestry, agriculture, and development. Econometric estimation linking climate with the net returns to land production is integrated with a discrete‐choice estimation of plot‐level land‐use change. Comparing projected land‐use changes across scenarios, this research finds that drier and warmer climate scenarios favor forest land, wetter and cooler climate scenarios favor developed land, and wetter and warmer climate scenarios favor crop lands. The land-use projections were used in other portions of the RPA that examined projections of ecosystem services. Outputs include one journal article, one RPA chapter, and one published dataset.
• David Lewis collaborated with an Oregon State University PhD student to publish a paper that estimates the effects of changes in western US wildfire risks on the economic value of private timberland across Washington, Oregon, and California. The research uses a purchased data set from Core Logic, a real estate data vendor, to build a pooled cross-sectional dataset of over 9,000 transactions of private timberland between 2004 and 2020. The analysis estimates the effects of large wildfires and drought stress on market prices for private timberland across the three Pacific states of the western U.S. In addition to estimating the land price impacts of wildfires on parcels that were directly burned, the analysis identifies changes in risk expectations by estimating the impacts from wildfires that burned in close proximity rather than directly on timberland that was sold in the land market. Results indicate that recent increases in large wildfires and drought stress over the past two decades have lowered the economic value of timberland by approximately 10%, or about $11.2 billion in damages across the three Pacific states, with approximately 5.5% (~$6.2 billion) due to climate change. Most of the wildfire damages arise from changes in risk expectations. Results provide evidence on the costs of climate-induced extreme events on natural capital that have already occurred.
• Projects use nation-wide data on water quality measurements and expenditures by environmental nonprofit organizations during the period 2009 – 2017. These data are used to empirically measure the impact of expenditures by these organizations on local water quality both near and far away from border areas where streams leave states.
• Steven Dundas and a graduate student collaborator examine the relationship between increases in people using public lands with activity on a popular social media app (Lowe Mackenzie et al. 2023). They explore this issue in the Oregon State Park system by combining visitation data with park-specific georeferenced content and engagement indicators from Instagram. Using several empirical specifications, they show suggestive evidence that Instagram is not likely correlated to increased visitation everywhere, but only in a few locations generating high user participation within the app. They find no contemporary effect and a positive association with cumulative Instagram engagement indicators on visits at this subset of parks.
• Dundas and W5133 collaborator at the University of Georgia estimated the magnitude and direction of the economic effects of removing or retrofitting housing in hazard-prone coastal locations as a response to natural hazards (Hashida and Dundas 2023). Using data from a voluntary buyout and acquisition program in the U.S. state of New York, they recover hedonic estimates of the property value impacts of government-acquired properties in the state’s coastal counties. Results suggest that buyouts and acquisitions have sizable negative effects on prices for homes sold adjacent (≤100 m) to participating properties. The spatial scale of the impacts differs across policy types, with negative effects attenuating after 100 m for buyouts but persisting for acquisitions up to 1200 m. These impacts approach zero four years after policy initiation, and the effect of buyouts may turn positive after five years.

Texas A&M University

• Liqing Li and collaborator Amy Ando (Ohio State University) published a paper demonstrating a positive relationship between individuals' early-life experiences with nature and their willingness to pay for habitat restoration. This finding guides efforts by local and federal recreation agencies to enhance environmental education and access to recreational sites, particularly for children who might not otherwise engage in such activities.
• Liqiing Li and Amy Ando investigated the reduced-form effects of the Conservation Reserve Program on local employment, providing a nationwide analysis of the impacts of agricultural land retirement on the rural economy.
• Liqing Li and Aparna Howlader from Chatham University examined the persistent and immediate effects of land retirement on the labor market and land tenure, using evidence from the historical Conservation Reserve Program in the U.S. They also probed the underlying mechanisms of the program's varying degrees of impact, considering factors such as access to irrigation, race, and different initial tenancy structures.

University of Florida

• Weizhe Weng and collaborators have developed an integrated assessment model to examine the linkages between land use, fertilizer application decisions, and their environmental outcomes along with associated social costs. Our model results highlight the finding that the co-benefits from nitrous oxide abatement are substantial, and their inclusion increases the benefit–cost ratio of water quality policies. Consideration of these co-benefits has the potential to reverse the conclusions of benefit–cost analysis in the assessment of current water quality policy. Support of climate-friendly practices (e.g., cover crops, low/no-till, nutrient management) is highlighted in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s climate-smart agriculture program. Many climate-friendly practices are also water friendly. Thinking from the other side, co-benefits of water pollution reduction would exist in climate change policies. Considering the joint production of water and climate benefits, quantifying both climate and water benefits is essential and would help to avoid biased benefit estimates if both were modeled separately. This study has been published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

University of Georgia

• Task 1-1: Lusi Xie tested the cost-effectiveness of reverse auction mechanisms to buy back irrigation water for protecting endangered aquatic species during droughts through field experiments with farmers in Georgia. The findings provide important insights into designing cost-effective payments for ecosystem services with the goal of providing sufficient streamflow while also minimizing the economic impact on the agricultural sector.
• Task 1-1: Lusi Xie started a cooperative agreement with the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) in partnership with researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of Delaware. The objective of the project is to evaluate the relative effectiveness of small financial assistance incentives, lottery-style financial incentives, and technical assistance in encouraging Conservation Reserve Program participants to engage in citizen science efforts and to provide superior land management practices.
• Task 1-1: Lusi Xie, in collaboration with Leah Palm-Forster (University of Delaware), Mykel Taylor (Auburn University), and Simanti Banerjee (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) published a paper about factors influencing enrollment of leased cropland in the Conservation Stewardship Program in Kansas. The findings offer insights into refining the design of Conservation Stewardship Program to enhance the participation of leased cropland, thereby fostering improved conservation practices.
• Task 1-4: Lusi Xie is examining groundwater pumping behavior under conditions of varying risks of saltwater intrusion through laboratory experiments. This research aims to shed light on how individuals respond to heterogeneous risks, offering perspectives on water resource management strategies in areas prone to such challenges.
• During the reporting period, I presented my work on prescribed burn's adaptation benefit in mitigating wildfire risks at Auburn University, the AERE annual meeting, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), and the University of Alaska, Anchorage. For a NOAA-funded project evaluating the non-market valuation of wetlands, other PIs and I hosted stakeholder meetings in Delaware Bay, Charleston, SC, and Savannah, GA, to get feedback on our research design (e.g., surveys).
• Craig Landry (Keynote Speaker): "Sustainability Habitation of Barrier Islands" Bald Head Island Conservancy, 2nd Annual Coastal Sustainability Symposium: Bald Head Island, NC

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Atallah and colleagues revised and resubmitted a review article related to task 1.1 and titled “Economics of Adoption of Artificial Intelligence-Based Digital Technologies for a Sustainable Agriculture.” Annual Review of Resource Economics.
• Atallah and colleague revised a research article for resubmission. The article is titled “Managing Herbicide-Resistant Weeds with Robots: A Weed Ecological Economic Model.” Agricultural Economics.
• Atallah submitted an Elsevier book chapter related to task 1.1 titled “Economics of Carbon Farming”.
• Atallah disseminated findings from a published article titled “Family Forest Landowner Preferences for Managing Invasive Species: Control Methods, Ecosystem Services, and Neighborhood Effects”. to the Forest Stewards Guild through an online webinar. 01/25/ 2024. Findings were shared with ~15 resource managers and landowner outreach professionals nationally on forest landowner preferences for managing invasive species.
• Atallah and graduate students conducted a pilot survey with 19 US maple syrup producers to estimate their willingness to diversify the tree composition of their sugarbushes for increase climate resilience.

University of Wyoming

• Research completed by Kelsey Lensegrav, Christopher Bastian, Anders Van Sandt, Bart Geerts, Kinsale Day, and Stephen Rahimi, at the University of Wyoming – entitled Economic Impacts of Climate Affected Snow Depths on Wyoming’s Snowmobile Recreation. Snowmobiling is a significant outdoor recreation activity in the Northern Rocky Mountain Region, contributing to winter tourism revenue in Wyoming and neighboring states. However, climate change poses a threat to snow levels in the region, potentially impacting the snowmobiling industry and rural communities that rely on it. Despite its economic importance, there is a lack of research on how climate change may affect snowmobiling and its economic impacts. This study analyzes the effect of climate-affected snow conditions, specifically snow depth, on snowmobile recreation in Wyoming and estimates the resulting economic impacts across recreation sites. The research combines climate forecasts with a recreation demand model and input-output analysis. Survey data from resident and nonresident snowmobilers are used to develop a recreation demand model, which estimates the probability of individuals visiting specific sites based on snow depth and trail attributes. Using downscaled climate predictions and historical snow data, the study estimates changes in snow depth at snowmobile trail areas in Wyoming. The results show that snow depths are expected to decrease with lower elevation and potentially increase with higher elevation sites. Snow depth positively influences site choice, indicating potential changes in snowmobilers' travel patterns. The study's input-output results reflect the geographical redistribution and overall changes in snowmobilers' expenditures, labor income, and jobs due to climate change in Wyoming. These findings have implications for recreation-dependent rural communities, as they can use the information to plan for future economic growth and diversification in the face of climate change's potential impacts on snowmobiling. This research was completed as a thesis by Kelsey Lensegrav, and it has also been presented as a selected paper at the WAEA meetings in July of 2023.

University of Rhode Island

• Corey Lang collaborated with URI graduate student Andrew Bechard to examine health impacts of Florida Red Tide. Harmful algal blooms (HABs) have been found to cause increases in healthcare visits for a variety of illnesses to humans if exposure and contact is sufficient. We use a more comprehensive dataset than previously implemented in prior literature to better isolate visits by healthcare facility type and proximity to bloom. Using a difference-in-differences model, our results suggest HABs cause an increase of 23.67 healthcare admissions per zip code per month across four HAB-related diagnoses. This impact is a 3,000% increase over baseline non-bloom times and an increase in monthly healthcare costs of about $250,000 for the entire impacted area. Our data include inpatient non-emergency and outpatient healthcare visits, which account for over 60% of all HAB-related healthcare visits, meaning that prior literature that has not measured those facilities has greatly underestimated HAB health impacts. The research was published in Harmful Algae.

Objective 2: Advance Economic Valuation Methods and Uses to Enhance Natural Resource Management, Policy, and Decision-Making

Colorado State University

• Jesse Burkhardt has ongoing work with the National Park Service to estimate willingness to pay for approximately 23 national parks. This work will be combined with work by Jude Bayham, another W5133 member, to advance travel cost methods.
• Jude Bayham has three projects that contribute to objective 2, all focused on developing recreation demand models using mobile device data. The first is comparing travel cost modeling based on survey data to mobile device data in the same location. Jude Bayham and collaborators are preparing a manuscript to submit in 2024. The second explores the use of high-resolution mobile device data to estimate more complex recreation demand models. The third focuses on how mobile device data can be used to facilitate economic impact evaluation.
• We worked on a paper that examined the potential impacts of racism on our environmental and resource economics methods, including valuation.
• We also worked on a grant that asks how access and preferences around carbon markets affects participation and the potential for scaling up. As part of this, we are examining preference heterogeneity in a choice experiment.

Oregon State University

• Dundas, David Kling, and collaborators also designed a choice experiment to examine public preferences for coastal dune ecosystem restoration in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (Nguyen et al. 2023). Dunes are a public good whose natural state is now rare. Respondents are asked to choose among hypothetical projects that vary by project size, restoration quality, recreation access, flooding risk, and cost. Restoration quality is defined as closeness to the natural ecosystem. We find that increasing restoration quality results in significantly higher welfare gains than increasing the size of restoration area. Maintaining recreation access is preferred, and programs with recreation restrictions yield positive willingness to pay only if accompanied by the highest restoration quality.
• Alix-Garcia is managing an RCT in the Dominican Republic. The intervention is a short experiential education program on mangroves directed at kids aged 7-18 who participate in sports clubs. The features of this project that are relevant for this report are methodological.  We use machine learning, list experiments, and an incentivized willingness to pay experiment to measure impacts of environmental education.  Machine learning is used to help evaluate changes in their perception of mangroves in response to an open ended question.  We apply a natural language model to help categorize these responses.  A second key outcome is littering behavior.  To minimize reporting bias due to negative connotations, we use a list experiment to help measure this outcome.  List experiments "hide" less acceptable or illegal behaviors within a list.  The list itself is randomized across respondents such that some lists contain the behavior of interests while others don't.  Respondents report only the number of items in a list which are "true" to them.  In other contexts, such as risky sexual behavior, this method has proven effective in measuring incidence.  A third measurement innovation in this study is to offer respondents the opportunity to purchase honey produced in the mangroves.  The justification for this is that if the mangrove education intervention changes willingness to pay for conservation, then treated individuals will be more likely to purchase the honey at any price level.  We survey both participating children and their parents, with the expectation of testing for spillover effects from kids to parents.  Although this project is international, the methodology developed here could be used in multiple settings.
• In collaboration with W5133 investigator Dundas, Kling coauthored an original study of public preferences for sandy beach and coastal dune landscape restoration in the Pacific Northwest (Nguyen et al. 2023). The lead author for the study, Tu Nguyen, was an Oregon State University PhD student, and the journal article was based on her dissertation research. The research finds that the public places a relatively higher value on restoring coastal dune landscape closest to its natural configuration before the introduction of invasive, compared with restoration projects that are less ambitious but cover a larger area. Preserving access for recreators within restored areas is also preferred by the public.

Texas A&M University

• Liqing Li and collaborator Mitch Livy from California State University, Fullerton, study how different types of urban green spaces are capitalized across various housing types and communities using housing transaction data.
• Liqing Li published a paper estimating the value that people place on urban trees and examining whether tree plantings triggered gentrification in the neighborhoods they were designed to help. The results find that environmental justice policies can provide public goods without significant displacement costs to the existing population.
• Liqing Li, José J. Sánchez (US Forest Service), and John Loomis (Colorado State University) conducted a choice experiment in Arizona to understand the relationship between perceived and objective fire risk and willingness to pay for fire mitigation programs. The results show that people’s perceived risks and the professional objective fire risks assessed by experts differ significantly, suggesting that managers may need to develop effective messaging and education programs for those communities where risk perceptions differ from expert assessments.
• Liqing and collaborator Dede Long from Harvey Mudd College study residents' willingness to contribute money and time to community gardens, an essential form of urban agriculture. Our findings indicate that while residents highly value the gardens' private benefits, they are not inclined to contribute to their public benefits. Additionally, residents' preferences for community gardens differ based on their socioeconomic status and accumulated gardening experience.

University of Florida

• Weizhe Weng and collaborators conducted a study that examines cellphone tracking data from 2019-20. The study was able to pinpoint the real-time impacts of COVID-19 on visitation to Central Park, one of the nation’s largest urban parks in one of the areas hit hardest by the pandemic. The clear impact on public park visitation highlights the often-overlooked societal welfare changes that resulted in a $450 million dollar welfare loss.By providing a clearer understanding of the welfare loss in terms of urban park use during the pandemic, this study provides an opportunity for informed site management decisions in future similar events. This study has been published in Plos One.

University of Georgia

• Lusi Xie and the collaborator Wiktor Adamowicz (University of Alberta) published a paper that examines the temporal reliability of contingent behavior trip data in Kuhn-Tucker recreation demand models. Their findings indicate that coefficient and welfare estimates remain largely reliable over time. This paper enhances confidence in using contingent behavior trip data to model demands within and beyond recreation contexts and provide insights into the broader application of Kuhn-Tucker models.
• Craig Landry (Presentation): "Valuing Green & Hybrid Infrastructure for Flood Control, Ecosystem Service Enhancement, and Resiliency on Tybee Island (GA)" Georgia Water Resources Conference: Athens, GA

University of Rhode Island

• Corey Lang collaborated with URI graduate students Luran Dong and Vasu Gaur to examine externalities related to onshore wind turbines using hedonic valuation methods. The purpose of this paper is to update and extend prior studies that examine the impact of onshore wind turbines on property values. Our data come from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, two states that are population dense and rapidly transitioning to renewable energy. We use a difference-in-differences identification strategy with treatment defined by proximity. In contrast to prior research in these states, our results suggest that property values decline when wind turbines are built. These negative impacts are mostly confined to properties within 1 km of a turbine. However, we delve deeper into these aggregate results by examining how treatment effects vary for different regions and how treatment effects vary over time. Importantly, we find that the negative impacts found are almost entirely driven by Cape Cod and Nantucket, Massachusetts. We estimate small and typically insignificant effects for other regions of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Further, we estimate dynamic models that allow for heterogeneous treatment effects in time since construction. These results suggest that negative impacts abate over time, though in the case of Cape Cod and Nantucket never go to zero. Possible explanations for our complex findings include contagion from opposition to Cape Wind, preference-based sorting, and acclimatization. This paper was published in Energy Policy.
• Corey Lang collaborated with Jarron VanCeylon (URI) and Amy Ando (Ohio State) to examine how land conservation impacts different households financially. Land conservation efforts throughout the United States sustain ecological benefits while generating wealth in the housing market through capitalization of amenities. This paper estimates the benefits of conservation that are capitalized into proximate home values and quantifies how those benefits are distributed across demographic groups. Using detailed property and household-level data from Massachusetts, we estimate that new land conservation led to $62 million in new housing wealth equity. However, houses owned by low-income or Black or Hispanic households are less likely to be located near protected areas, and hence, these populations are less likely to benefit financially. Direct study of the distribution of this new wealth from capitalized conservation is highly unequal, with the richest quartile of households receiving 43%, White households receiving 91%, and the richest White households receiving 40%, which is nearly 140% more than would be expected under equal distribution. We extend our analysis using census data for the entire United States and observe parallel patterns. We estimate that recent land conservation generated $9.8 billion in wealth through the housing market and that wealthier and White households benefited disproportionately. These findings suggest regressive and racially disparate incidence of the wealth benefits of land conservation policy. This paper was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• Corey Lang collaborated with Shanna Pearson‐Merkowitz (U. Maryland) and Zachary Scott (URI) to examine how voters respond to changes in how costs are presented on ballot referendums. Using an original survey experiment, we examine willingness to approve bonds, randomizing both the total cost of the bond and the framing of the cost as either a personal cost or an aggregate amount. We find that respondents are less supportive of bonds when the bond is framed as a personal expense and that respondents are more cost responsive when they see personal costs. There is also substantial heterogeneity based on the respondent's partisanship and the policy domain of the bond. This paper was published in Public Budgeting & Finance.
• Corey Lang collaborated with Shanna Pearson‐Merkowitz (U. Maryland) and Andrew Bechard (URI) to examine how voters respond to total bond cost relative to other features of the ballot. Municipal and state governments are often constitutionally bound to ask voters to approve new government debt through voting on bond referendums. Generally, politicians expect voters to balk at higher-cost bonds and be more willing to approve lower-cost bonds. However, there is minimal research on how the amount of a bond affects voter support. We implement a survey experiment that presents respondents with hypothetical ballots, in which the cost of proposed bonds, the number of bonds on the ballot, and the order in which they are presented, are all randomized. Our results suggest that support is not responsive to the amount of the bond, even when the cost is well outside what is typical and within the bounds of what the government can afford. In contrast, we find other aspects of the ballot matter significantly more for bond referendum approval. The more bonds on the ballot and being placed lower on the ballot both reduce support significantly. This paper was published in State Politics & Policy Quarterly.

Virginia Tech

• During the 2023/24 reporting period, Moeltner continued work on a new estimation framework that combines output from hedonic regression and matching estimators to identify the most efficient model at lowest risk of mis-specification bias. I submitted a manuscript to a leading field journal.
• Moeltner also started work on a novel estimation framework that combines random forests (a machine learning tool) with nonparametric willingness to-pay models. Preliminary results based on simulated data illustrate the advantages of this framework.
• During the 2023/24 reporting period, Moeltner continued to refine the Locally Weighted Regression (LWR) framework I developed during the previous reporting period. I also initiated work on a classical version of the LWR to enhance computational speed compared to the Bayesian version I had originally developed.

Objective 3: Integrated Policy and Decision-Making

Colorado State University

• Jesse Burkhardt entered into a cooperative agreement with the US Forest Service. The project is run by Sonja Kolstoe, another W5133 member and is broadly about understanding the relationships between wildfires and community drinking water systems.
• We worked on integrating water allocation models with economic outcomes to assess the benefits of demand reductions, storage capacity, and institutional change in the face of climate change-driven changes in surface water availability.

Oregon State University

• “Examining the Effectiveness of Nonprofit Groups’ Expenditures on Species Recovery: the Case of Pacific Salmon and Steelhead” The project uses data from 115 watersheds in Washington, Oregon, California, and Idaho on salmonid population counts and expenditures by environmental nonprofit organizations and government agencies during the period 2000 – 2018. These data are used to empirically measure the impact of expenditures by these organizations and agencies on counts of salmonids at the watershed level.
• Kling coauthored a conceptual analysis of "ecological federalism", which describes polities like the United States where social-ecological systems are managed simultaneously by different levels of government (e.g., state and federal) (Sanchirico et al. 2023). This paper is among the first to map out issues raised by contemporary ecological federalism that differ from the related but distinct concept of environmental federalism. For example, the nature of spillover across jurisdictional boundaries. While spillover of invasive species is similar to environmental federalism concerns about polluting industries, positive spillovers - like those connecting harvested marine species - are more likely to occur in ecological federalism problems.

University of Florida

• As a water policy specialist, Weizhe Weng has worked together with diverse stakeholders to develop innovative analysis tools to quantify the complex interactions between human decisions and water quality and quantity. The related project has resulted in the delivery of 7 academic and extension presentations, with around 240 attendees. In particular, the extension efforts have led to more than 10 office consultations, participation of approximately 900 individuals in group learning activities, 81 consultations via telephone and zoom, 4 email consultations, and approximate 35,000 visits to the social media platforms.

University of Maryland

• To date, this project has conducted two separate investigations of issues related to the design of CREP and similar conservation subsidy programs: (1) a theoretical investigation of contract design and project selection with a focus on premature contract termination and (2) an econometric investigation of how CREP contract terms influence landowners’ willingness to participate, with a focus on the roles of contract length and tradeoffs between upfront and annual payments.
• We have used economic theory to evaluate the design of long term conservation subsidy contracts in light of the fact that farmland owners may opt out of that contract before the contract’s expiration date. We show that the current contract structure makes premature opt-out too attractive and derive an alternative contract structure that reduces premature project cancellation, increases environmental benefits, and improves the cost-effectiveness of a conservation subsidy program. A numerical simulation indicates that the improvements in performance are large enough to be economically significant.
• We have conducted a stated preference study using data from a survey of owners of farmland with riparian frontage to investigate the levels of upfront and annual payments needed to induce farmland owners’ to enroll in a program like CREP (willingness to accept). Data from that survey indicate that a large plurality of farmland owners have no interest in enrolling in such programs at any levels of upfront or annual payments that would be considered reasonable. That finding indicates that there are limits to the levels of nutrient emissions reductions a voluntary program like CREP can achieve. Statistical analysis of the data indicates that, among those that are potentially willing to consider enrolling in programs like CREP, the average subsidy level required to induce enrollment is substantially greater than current subsidy levels, raising questions about the cost-effectiveness of such programs. Statistical analysis of the data indicates that whether payment is front-loaded or provided gradually over the lifetime of the contract makes very little difference to landowners potentially willing to enroll in programs like CREP. Finally, statistical analysis of the data indicates that streamside buffers are considered to pose substantial risks to farming operations; the data are insufficient to identify the nature of those risks, however.

University of Wyoming

• Economic Assessment of Nonpoint Source Pollution Management in the Tongue River Basin, WY. Best Management Practices (BMPs) matched with WTP levels derived from meta-analysis. Herein is the opportunity to utilize existing secondary data from modified enterprise budgets with previous surface water demand studies. Best management practices (BMPs) undertaken by private landowners generates private and public benefits. Determining a payment above project costs to incentivize voluntary adoption is vital for land managers going forward as public funding decreases and climate change stresses our water supplies.  In the Tongue River Basin, WY, excellent water quality provides trout habitat and related ecosystem goods and services.  Tourism and agriculture are two of the largest industries in the area- yet one contributes to NPS pollution while the other relies on clean water for recreational opportunities.  We conducted a meta-analysis to determine willingness to pay for water quality improvements.  We then built a ranch model to determine willingness to accept payment for best management practices.  With these two estimates, we assessed the zone of potential contract agreement for adoption of BMPs in the Tongue River Basin, WY.