Given potential growth in outdoor rock climbing and its concentration on public lands, the management of climbing access in wilderness areas is an issue of considerable national controversy in the United States. A proposed rule change by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) would prohibit the use of...

This paper investigates links between the strength and type of social networks and private forest conservation activity in rural Nepal. Using Nepal household survey data, this paper tests the effects of alternative social network indices on the number of trees planted on private land. Our...

In situations characterized by true uncertainty and potential irreversibility, the safe minimum standard (SMS) approach is a decision rule to protect some critical natural resource-unless the social costs of doing so are somehow "intolerable." The SMS has been discussed widely, but actual case...

Pressures on public lands and waterways are resulting increasingly in the rationing of public access by lottery. Upon accounting for the uncertainties of random rationing, discrete choice models lend themselves to analyzing participation in public resource lotteries and estimating welfare...

The charter forest experiment at the Valles Caldera National Preserve (VCNP) in New Mexico provides land managers, policymakers, and researchers a unique opportunity to examine an alternative public land management institution. The VCNP mature bull elk permit lottery has been the largest...

Forests provide non-market goods and services that people are implicitly willing to pay for through hedonic housing and labor markets. But it is unclear if compensating differentials arise in these markets at the regional level. This empirical question is addressed in a study of Arizona and New...