Optimal Allocation of Land for Conservation: A General Equilibrium Analysis

This paper was replaced with a revised version on 7/26/10Conservation, General Equilibrium Modeling, Optimal Land Allocation, Conservation Tax, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Q57, C68,

Valuing Ecosystem Services from Restoring Ancient Irrigation Systems: An application comparing labor vs. monetary payments for choice experiments

The use of stated preference methods in developing countries is growing with the increasing concern about the environment as economies develop. At the same time using monetary payment vehicles and estimating a Willingnessto Pay (WTP) can be problematic in rural or low incomes areas in developing countries. Many respondents in these areas regularly engage in barter and paying with labor and do not use monetary payments for all transactions. This distinction from urban areas with a monetary economy and with most settings in developed countries can impact results from valuation studies as the WTP elicited from rural and low-income areas is likely to be low even though respondents may have a high value and be willing to pay through other means. In response to these concerns, a growing number of stated preference studies explore using both monetary and non-monetary payment options. We contribute to this literature by exploring how the use of monetary vs labor payment options can impact values elicited from choice experiment studies conducted in rural developing country settings. Our application is a choice experiment survey to value restoring an ancient irrigation system know as cascading tank systems in Sri Lankan. The cascading tank systems are designed to complement the surrounding landscape and has parallels to the Japanese land use system of Satoyama. In Sri Lanka, these irrigations systems were created over 1500-2000 years ago but are still functioning today and provide irrigation for nearly 40% of the total irrigable area of the country. At the same time these ancient systems are degrading and there a large number of efforts to restore these systems which the FAO recently identified as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). We conduct a choice experiment to understand the WTP/willingness-to-contribute of rural households to restore these irrigation systems. We also contribute to the literature on the applications of choice experiments in developing country settings by comparing data gathering methods, specifically individual surveys vs group information session. We find that in the individual survey settings respondents are more willing to contribute labor (compared to an equivalent monetary payment). Based on the early results we find that there is no difference between the group and individual survey settings when the survey is presented as a monetary payment but for the labor payment treatment, the group setting results in a positive payment coefficient for the labor payment attribute (i.e. respondents are willing to contribute labor when the survey is conducted in a group setting). We are currently exploring the heterogeneity of these results across respondents and plan to include these new results in the presentation as well

REDD+ Policy Preferences in Ethiopia: Developing Controls for Attribute Non-Attendance in Choice Experiment Data

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is a payment for ecosystem services system created under the UN to reduce deforestation and degradation in developing countries. The REDD+ program creates markets for carbon sequestration services where REDD+ buyers are in UN-FCCC Annex 1 countries (developed countries) and sellers are in non-Annex 1 (typically developing countries). About 25% of the world’s forests are community managed (three times as much as private forests) but there is limited knowledge and information on preferences of households in communities with community managed forests toward programs like REDD+. Further, we do not have a good understanding of the true costs borne by these households when participating in programs like REDD+. We use a choice experiment survey of rural Ethiopian communities to understand respondents’ preferences toward the institutional structure of REDD+ contracts. Choice experiment surveys, a non-market valuation technique, allow the researcher to elicit preferences, including the tradeoffs between characteristics of the good or policy being studied and the marginal willingness to pay for individual characteristics of the program/good being valued. Preliminary results show that respondents care about how REDD+ programs are structured with regard to the manner in which the payments are divided between the households and the communities, the restrictions on using grazing land, and the level of payments received for the program. We find that the required firewood gathering reduction does not impact some households’ choice of REDD+ contracts. We are currently testing new methods in attribute non-attendance to better explain this finding

Optimum Land Allocation for Species Protection and Military Training on DoD Installations

Replaced with revised version of poster 8/11/10.Environmental Economics and Policy, Health Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,

Teaching Fisheries Bycatch: Exploring Economic and Behavioral drivers of bycatch through a classroom game

This paper presents a pedagogical exercise to explore the economics of price-based fisheries bycatch. In the exercise students experience the economic incentives that lead to bycatch due to highgrading; the discarding of low-value fish. We first discuss existing fisheries economics pedagogical activities and how our exercise is distinct. We then identify over forty economics, environmental studies, geography, management, and philosophy courses where the exercise could be played. Next, we describe the game and share results and student feedback. Finally, we provide discussion prompts and extensions to illustrate how incentives and policies can change fishing behavior to lead to sustainable fisheries

Feeling the Heat: Climate Change is Becoming a Big Factor in Business Decision-making, Risk Assessment

Portland Business Journal Publisher and President Candace Beeke spoke recently with PSU’s Sahan Dissanayake and Jennifer Price, with Moss Adams, about the direct and indirect effects of climate change on business, along with the physical impacts and economic hazards. Here are their insights

Assessing Visitor Preferences and Willingness to pay for Marine National Park Hikkaduwa: application of choice experiment method

Eco-tourism all over the world is threatened by the fact that the coral reefs and associated ecosystems are in a process of disappearing at an accelerated rate due to several natural and anthropogenic causes. In this context, the Marine National Park Hikkaduwa (MNPH), one of the four marine national parks in Sri Lanka, that features a fringing coral reef with a high degree of biodiversity, reports a decreasing trend in visitation mainly due to a condition of coral bleaching caused by an El Nino effect. Unfortunately, the regeneration of the corals is found to be slowed by continuous anthropogenic activities. Against this background, the research focuses on investigating how visitor behaviour changes with the degraded situation and what avenues are available to attract more visitors to ensure benefit flows. In this concern, visitor preferences regarding the quality of the habitats and other facilities and their significance were analysed under a conditional logistic regression model. Further, a choice experiment was carried out with a randomly selected group of 200 visitors to diagnose their response to the present condition of the coral reef, the beach, and the facilities provided. Under a conditional logistic model, it was discovered that the condition of the coral reef is an important attribute that answers the question of why visitors are not willing to pay if the corals are bleached and broken. It was also discovered that the visitors are willing to pay LKR 322.52 if they are provided with new boats and new safety jackets. The results indicate that benefit flows could be enhanced with the restoration of coral ecosystems and the improvement of the physical infrastructure. Overall, the research attempts to establish that the standard maintenance of the coral reef along with high-quality visitor welfare facilities to match visitor preferences will positively impact all types of payment compliance issues with regard to the visitors

Measuring risk preferences in rural Ethiopia

Risk aversion has generally been found to decrease in income. This may lead one to expect that people in poor countries will be more risk averse than inhabitants of rich countries. Recent comparative findings with stu- dents suggest the opposite, potentially giving rise to a risk-income paradox. Findings with students, however, may result from selection effects. We test whether a paradox indeed exists by measuring the risk preferences of over 500 household heads across several regions in the highlands of Ethiopia. We do so using certainty equivalents, which are well suited to the task due to their simplicity. We find high degrees of risk tolerance, consistent with the evidence obtained for students using the same tasks. In particular, the level of risk tolerance is higher than the one found for student samples in most Western and even middle income countries. We also find risk tolerance to increase in income proxies within our sample, thus completing the paradox

IMU-based Modularized Wearable Device for Human Motion Classification

Human motion analysis is used in many different fields and applications. Currently, existing systems either focus on one single limb or one single class of movements. Many proposed systems are designed to be used in an indoor controlled environment and must possess good technical know-how to operate. To improve mobility, a less restrictive, modularized, and simple Inertial Measurement units based system is proposed that can be worn separately and combined. This allows the user to measure singular limb movements separately and also monitor whole body movements over a prolonged period at any given time while not restricted to a controlled environment. For proper analysis, data is conditioned and pre-processed through possible five stages namely power-based, clustering index-based, Kalman filtering, distance-measure-based, and PCA-based dimension reduction. Different combinations of the above stages are analyzed using machine learning algorithms for selected case studies namely hand gesture recognition and environment and shoe parameter-based walking pattern analysis to validate the performance capability of the proposed wearable device and multi-stage algorithms. The results of the case studies show that distance-measure-based and PCA-based dimension reduction will significantly improve human motion identification accuracy. This is further improved with the introduction of the Kalman filter. An LSTM neural network is proposed as an alternate classifier and the results indicate that it is a robust classifier for human motion recognition. As the results indicate, the proposed wearable device architecture and multi-stage algorithms are cable of distinguishing between subtle human limb movements making it a viable tool for human motion analysis.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, 28 reference

Feature extraction from MRI ADC images for brain tumor classification using machine learning techniques

Diffusion-weighted (DW) imaging is a well-recognized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that is being routinely used in brain examinations in modern clinical radiology practices. This study focuses on extracting demographic and texture features from MRI Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) images of human brain tumors, identifying the distribution patterns of each feature and applying Machine Learning (ML) techniques to differentiate malignant from benign brain tumors