This paper develops a framework for the valuation and management of tropical forests that reflects their ecological and economic characteristics. The analysis demonstrates the importance of modeling the feasible use patterns and the information structure in tropical forest management decisions....

Managed forest ecosystems—agroforestry systems in which crops such as coffee and bananas are planted side-by-side with woody perennials—are being touted as a means of safeguarding forests along with the ecological services they provide. Yet we know little about the determinants of land cover...

More than three-quarters of Mexico’s coffee is grown on small plots shaded by the existing forest. Because they preserve forest cover, shade coffee farms provide vital ecological services including harboring biodiversity and preventing soil erosion. Unfortunately, tree cover in Mexico’s...

This paper discusses the application of a spatial-intertemporal model for tropical forest management to Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. This type of model, especially the spatial components, finds different optimal land allocations than do traditional models at empirically relevant levels of...

Few economic analyses examine land trusts, their decisions, and the land-trust “industry,” despite their growing importance. For example, statistics on the wide variation in the number of trusts in different regions of the United States raise questions about whether such variation makes...

This paper develops a new measure of the spatial pattern of roads in an area, named the Road Network Agglomeration Index (RNAI), and explores the impact of this dimension of road networks on spatial patterns of conservation networks. RNAI is more spatially descriptive than road density measures...

A large detailed data set is used to examine the relationship between housing prices and several environmental quality indicators representing air, water, and land influences. Our primary concern is the influence of waste site proximity on housing prices. The results indicate that individuals...

Shade-grown coffee provides a livelihood to many farmers, protects biodiversity, and creates environmental services. Many shade-coffee farmers have abandoned production in recent years, however, in response to declines in international coffee prices. This paper builds a farmer decision model...

This paper examines the interaction of spatial and dynamic aspects of resource extraction from forests by local people. Highly cyclical and varied across space and time, the patterns of resource extraction resulting from the spatial-temporal model bear little resemblance to the patterns drawn...

Managed forest ecosystems like shade coffee supply valuable ecological services. Yet little is known about the drivers and characteristics of clearing in such systems. We present a spatial econometric analysis of land cover in a shade coffee region in southern Mexico. We find that plots close to...