Wildfire Risk Management on a Landscape with Public and Private Ownership: Who Pays?

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The impact of buffer zone size and management on illegal extraction, park protection and enforcement

Many protected areas or parks in developing countries have buffer zones at their boundaries to achieve the dual goals of protecting park resources and providing resource benefits to neighbouring people. Despite the prevalence of these zoning policies, few behavioural models of people’s buffer zone use inform the sizing and management of those zones. This paper uses a spatially explicit resource extraction model to examine the impact of buffer zone size and management on extraction by local people, both legal and illegal, and the impact of that extraction on forest quality in the park’s core and buffer zone. The results demonstrate trade-offs between the level of enforcement, the size of a buffer zone, and the amount of illegal extraction in the park; and describe implications for “enrichment” of buffer zones and evaluating patterns of forest degradation

Wildlife Conservation and Land Development Risk in Virginia, USA

There is rich literature in reserve site selection for wildlife conservation, but little has investigated the spatial correlation of risks presented by hazards. This paper contributes to the literature by applying the modeling framework developed in Busby et al. (2011), which incorporates spatially correlated risk into the reserve site selection problem, to a Virginia landscape where fine-scale species data is available. In this context, we consider both homogeneous and heterogeneous on-site land development risks. Finally, we apply a budget constraint to our maximal covering species problem to investigate how land cost impacts optimal reserve design and the level of species protection. Using fine-scale species data in the analysis, we identify the types of settings where incorporating spatially correlated risk into conservation reserve design can lead to significant improvements in species protection

Spatially-Correlated Risk in Nature Reserve Site Selection

Establishing nature reserves protects species from land cover conversion and the resulting loss of habitat. Even within a reserve, however, many factors such as fires and defoliating insects still threaten habitat and the survival of species. To address the risk to species sur- vival after reserve establishment, reserve networks can be created that allow some redun- dancy of species coverage to maximize the expected number of species that survive in the presence of threats. In some regions, however, the threats to species within a reserve may be spatially correlated. As examples, fires, diseases, and pest infestations can spread from a starting point and threaten neighboring parcels’ habitats, in addition to damage caused at the initial location. This paper develops a reserve site selection optimization framework that compares the optimal reserve networks in cases where risks do and do not reflect spatial correlation. By exploring the impact of spatially-correlated risk on reserve networks on a stylized landscape and on an Oregon landscape, this analysis demonstrates an appropriate and feasible method for incorporating such post-reserve establishment risks in the reserve site selection literature as an additional tool to be further developed for future conservation planning

Near-optimal reserve design for the Oregon landscape.

<p>Near-optimal reserve design for the Oregon landscape.</p

Five-by-five grid stylized landscape.

<p>Five-by-five grid stylized landscape.</p

Examples of an optimal reserve design on the stylized landscape.

<p>Dark gray = species 1 present; light gray = species 2 present; black and white = biodiversity hotspot; reserve sites marked by bolded parcel outline. (a) Zero hotspot. (b) One hotspot. (c) Two adjacent hotspots. (d) Three hotspots.</p