Aspects of Ecosystem Persistence and the Optimal Conservation of Species

Although ecologists have long recognized the importance of persistence in determining the behavior of ecological systems, it is only very recently that economists have begun to analyze this notion in relation to the use of services that are provided by jointly determined ecological-economic systems (ecosystems). Consequently, there are a limited number of analyses of ecosystems that directly study the ecological and the economic aspects of this use issue. As such, this paper has two objectives. First, a novel technique is used to describe and bound the concept of ecosystem persistence. This technique directly incorporates the stochastic attributes of ecosystems. Second, the bound on persistence is used to analyze the question of the optimal conservation of species