Prioritizing Ecosystem Service Protection and Conservation Efforts in the Forest Plantations of the Red Hills

We use a stated choice experiment to estimate household willingness-to-pay for a program providing incentives to private forest land owners in the Red Hills region of southwest Georgia and northwest Florida. The estimated values of various program attributes inform a landscape analysis that identifies high-priority private forest land that could be targeted for conservation incentives. Households report an increase in utility from the program when it explicitly identifies a target ecosystem- service priority. Also, inclusion of stated preference values in the prioritization plan highlights a potential scarcity effect that has important implications for conservation targeting.Key Words: conservation priority, forest ecosystem service, stated choice, valuation(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Among the many ecosystem services that forests provide are timber, recreation opportunities, climate regulation, watershed services, habitat provision, and cultural services (Krieger 2001], Other than timber and some cases of recreation, these services provide mostly external benefits (they benefit someone other than the landowner]. Consequently, decisions that landowners make affect the surrounding community and/or the general public. This divide between decision-maker and beneficiary leads to economic inefficiencies that can be corrected through a variety of mechanisms. The problems associated with forests are particularly well suited to approaches that offer landowners incentives to provide ecosystem services (Pagiola and Platais 2007], A number of existing and newly proposed programs have been designed to provide private landowners with incentives to maintain forest cover on their land (Mercer, Cooley, and Hamilton 2010, Elliott 2011], The programs employ tax credits, market trading systems, direct payments to landowners, and other mechanisms to reduce the divide between the decision-makers and those who benefit from the forest cover. One challenge in designing these programs is how to target payments across a landscape (Engel, Pagiola, and Wunder 2008],We present an approach to prioritizing rural land for ecosystem service provision in the context of privately owned forest plantations in the rural south. The Red Hills region of southwest Georgia and north Florida is known for its scenic beauty and rich biological diversity. Considered by The Nature Conservancy as one of "America's Last Great Places," the plantations of the Red Hills contain the largest contiguous area of native longleaf pine forest on private land in the United States (The Nature Conservancy 2010], Those forests once covered up to 90 million acres that stretched from Virginia to Texas; now, less than 3 percent of those longleaf pine forests remain. The extremely diverse longleaf pine forest system is home to imperiled animals such as gopher tortoises, red-cockaded woodpeckers, and Bachman's sparrows. The Red Hills population of red-cockaded woodpeckers, a federally endangered species that requires mature pine forest to survive, is the largest found on private land in the southeast (Tall Timbers 2010],An efficient program to provide landowners with conservation incentives would allocate payments to owners of properties that offer the greatest net benefit (Engel, Pagiola, and Wunder 2008], Methods of targeting the incentives can be based on the degree of benefit provided (i.e., some quantification of the provision of ecosystem services], the amount of incentive payment required, the chance that existing ecosystem services would decline if no payment is made (additivity], or a combination of these factors (Wunscher, Engel, and Wunder 2008], Developing a system for targeting conservation incentives is similar to determining how to efficiently locate preserves and protected areas physically (e.g., Polasky, Camm, and Garber-Yonts 2001], In both cases, one would like to discern perfectly any variations in the quality and quantity of ecosystem services produced by individual locations and account for the spatial effects of fragmentation and complementarities. …