When villagers extract resources, such as fuelwood, fodder, or medicinal plants from forests, their decisions over where and how much to extract are influenced by market conditions, their particular opportunity costs of time, minimum consumption needs, and access to markets. This paper develops...

Traditionally, siting and sizing decisions for parks and reserves reflected ecological characteristics but typically failed to consider ecological costs created from displaced resource collection, welfare costs on nearby rural people, and enforcement costs. Using a spatial game-theoretic model...

This paper integrates a spatial fire-behavior model and a stochastic dynamic-optimization model to determine the optimal spatial pattern of fuel management and timber harvest. Each year’s fire season causes the loss of forest values and lives in the western United States. We use a multi-plot...

This article examines how the spatial configuration of forest ownership influences risk-mitigating behavior of public and private forestland owners over time. We use a game theoretic framework to examine how the public landowner’s investment in fuel management influences, and is influenced by,...

The number of land trusts in a state varies widely across the United States. Could such variation make economic sense? This paper models the optimal number of private conservation agents in a region and highlights two competing forces: spatial externalities in conservation that increase the...