Habitat loss is a primary cause of loss of biodiversity but conserving habitat for species presents challenges. Land parcels differ in their ability to produce returns for landowners and landowners may have private information about the value of the land to them. Land parcels also differ in the...

In this paper we analyze the efficiency of voluntary incentive-based land-use policies for biodiversity conservation. Two factors combine to make it difficult to achieve an efficient result. First, the spatial pattern of habitat across multiple landowners is important for determining...

Systems linking people and nature, known as social-ecological systems, are increasingly understood as complex adaptive systems. Essential features of these complex adaptive systems – such as nonlinear feedbacks, strategic interactions, individual and spatial heterogeneity, and varying time...

Forest fragmentation is a primary threat to terrestrial biodiversity. We combine a parcel-level econometric model of land-use transitions with spatially-explicit landscape simulations to predict the empirical distribution of fragmentation outcomes under given market conditions and policy...

This paper examines spatial spillovers associated with the adoption of organic dairy farming. We hypothesize that neighboring farmers can help to reduce the uncertainty of organic conversion by lowering the fixed costs of learning about the organic system. A spatially explicit 10-year panel...

Zoning is a widely used tool to manage residential growth. Estimating the effect of zoning on development, however, is difficult because zoning can be endogenous in models of land conversion. We compare three econometric methods that account for selection bias in a model of land conversion: a...

This article develops a theoretical model to analyze the spatial targeting of incentives for the restoration of forested landscapes when wildlife habitat can be enhanced by reducing fragmentation. The key theoretical result is that the marginal net benefits of increasing forest can be convex, in...

We estimate the impact of strict and multiple-use protected areas on forest disturbance in European Russia between 1985 and 2010. We construct a spatial panel dataset that includes five periods of change. We match protected areas to control observations and compare coefficients from fixed-versus...