Determinants of Agricultural Landowners’ Willingness to Supply Open Space Through Conservation Easements

Open space provides a range of benefits to many people of a community, beyond the benefits that accrue to private landowners. Parks and natural areas can be used for recreation; wetlands and forests supply storm-water drainage and wildlife habitat; farms and forests provide aesthetic benefits to surrounding residents. Moreover, undeveloped land can give relief from congestion. Agricultural lands are an important source of open space, but many of these lands are under great development pressure. One tool that is currently being used to aid in the preservation of open space by landowners is conservation easements. The rate of land protection by state and local land trusts has tripled since the beginning of the decade, and the West is the fastest growing region for both the number of acres under conservation easements and number of land trusts according to the Land Trust Alliance. Given the increased demand for amenities provided by private agricultural lands and the increased use of conservation easements, it is interesting to note that there is a paucity of research related to landowners’ preferences regarding conservation easements. The specific research objective of this paper is to determine important factors affecting an agricultural landowners’ potential choice regarding the placement of a parcel of land under a conservation easement. Knowing these factors could be useful to communities, public organizations and land trusts trying to provide open space to meet a growing demand for this public good. Information to construct a survey was obtained through a series of focus groups held in Wyoming and Colorado. Results from these focus groups were then used to develop twelve versions of a stated choice survey instrument. The first part of the survey included questions about the landowner’s specific community. These Likert scale questions were to designed to elicit a measurement of the respondents’ “sense of place” regarding his or her community. The second part of the survey questioned participants about their land and their land’s attributes, including what the landowner felt his land was worth, types of production and non-production activities land was used for, the types of developmental pressures being felt by the landowner, and the kinds of amenities he would like to conserve on his property. The third section of the survey included questions about the landowner’s personal knowledge of easements and two stated choice questions regarding conservation easements. These stated choice questions focused on five attributes: contract length, managerial control, wildlife habitat, access and payment. The final section of the survey asked respondents about demographic characteristics. Data were analyzed as a multinomial logit random utility model in LIMDEP. Respondents preferred an easement that was in perpetuity over an easement that was term in length. Respondents were less likely to accept an easement if public access on their property was required. As payment proportion in relation to the respondents’ perception of the value of their land went up, so did the likelihood that they would accept the easement. Landowners in Colorado were more likely to accept an easement than landowners in Wyoming. This is somewhat expected as developmental pressures in Colorado are higher than Wyoming, and thus far more easements have been transacted in Colorado than in Wyoming. Years on the land and connection to community were significant in explaining the acceptance of an easement scenario. The more connected one was to their community, the more likely they were to accept an easement. The longer a respondent had lived on their land, the more likely they were to accept an easement as well. The level of education a respondent had achieved negatively impacted easement acceptance. If an easement was already in place on a respondents’ property, the likelihood of accepting an easement scenario increased significantly.Land Economics/Use,

Structure of solutions of the Skyrme model on three-sphere. Numerical results

The hedgehog Skyrme model on three-sphere admits very rich spectrum of solitonic solutions which can be encompassed by a strikingly simple scheme. The main result of this paper is the statement of the tripartite structure of solutions of the model and the discovery in what configurations these solutions appear. The model contains features of more complicated models in General Relativity and as such can give insight into them.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures in, with emai

Unicyclic Components in Random Graphs

The distribution of unicyclic components in a random graph is obtained analytically. The number of unicyclic components of a given size approaches a self-similar form in the vicinity of the gelation transition. At the gelation point, this distribution decays algebraically, U_k ~ 1/(4k) for k>>1. As a result, the total number of unicyclic components grows logarithmically with the system size.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Shikimate pathway in apicomplexan parasites

No abstract available

HST NICMOS Imaging of z ~ 2 to 3 radio-quiet quasars

We will present the results of a NICMOS H-band imaging survey of a small sample of z ~ 2 to 3 radio-quiet quasars. We have resolved extension in at least 4 of 5 objects and find evidence for a wide range in the morphologies and magnitudes of these hosts. The host galaxy luminosities range from sub-L* to about 4 L*, with most of the hosts having luminosities about L*. These host galaxies have magnitudes and sizes consistent with those of the Ly break galaxies at similar redshifts and at similar rest wavelengths, but are about a magnitude fainter than the comparable 6C radio galaxies. One residual host component is not centered on the quasar nucleus, and several have close companions (within ~10 kpc), indications that these systems are possibly in some phase of a merger process.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, To appear in "Lifecycles of Radio Galaxies", eds. J. Biretta et al., New Astronomy Review

Don't bleach chaotic data

A common first step in time series signal analysis involves digitally filtering the data to remove linear correlations. The residual data is spectrally white (it is ``bleached''), but in principle retains the nonlinear structure of the original time series. It is well known that simple linear autocorrelation can give rise to spurious results in algorithms for estimating nonlinear invariants, such as fractal dimension and Lyapunov exponents. In theory, bleached data avoids these pitfalls. But in practice, bleaching obscures the underlying deterministic structure of a low-dimensional chaotic process. This appears to be a property of the chaos itself, since nonchaotic data are not similarly affected. The adverse effects of bleaching are demonstrated in a series of numerical experiments on known chaotic data. Some theoretical aspects are also discussed.Comment: 12 dense pages (82K) of ordinary LaTeX; uses macro psfig.tex for inclusion of figures in text; figures are uufile'd into a single file of size 306K; the final dvips'd postscript file is about 1.3mb Replaced 9/30/93 to incorporate final changes in the proofs and to make the LaTeX more portable; the paper will appear in CHAOS 4 (Dec, 1993

Nanoparticle tethered antioxidant response element as a biosensor for oxygen induced toxicity in retinal endothelial cells

Purpose: A novel system, based on biosensor DNA tethered to a nanoparticle, was developed for the treatment of retinopathy of prematurity. Methods: The construction of a five-layered nanoparticle was visualized with gel electrophoresis. Transcriptionally active PCR products (TAP) containing the biosensor sequence, were bioconjugated to the surface of magnetic nanoparticles yielding biosensor tethered magnetic nanoparticles (MNP). The biosensor was based on an enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) reporter gene driven by an enhanced antioxidant response element ( ARE). Image analysis and flow cytometry were used to characterize MNP delivery and biosensor activity. Results: The MNP penetrated dividing and migrating cells more often than quiescent endothelial cells in a wound-healing in vitro assay. Prussian blue staining demonstrated that more cells have nanoparticle cores than are transfected. When compared to naked TAP alone, MNP transfected more cells in a dose dependent manner. Both the biosensor alone and MNP induce gene expression in the presence of hyperoxia, greater than 1.5 fold over normoxic controls. These data also show that the MNP had a signal to noise ratio of 0.5 greater than the plasmid form of the biosensor as demonstrated by flow cytometry. Conclusions: This approach has the potential to allow the endothelial cells of the retinal vasculature to prevent or treat themselves after hyperoxic insult, rather than systemic treatment to protect or treat only the retina

The Strongly Polarized Afterglow of GRB 020405

We report polarization measurements and photometry for the optical afterglow of the gamma-ray burst GRB 020405. We measured a highly significant 9.9% polarization (in V band) 1.3 days after the burst and argue that it is intrinsic to the GRB. The light curve decay is well fitted by a $t^{-1.72}$ power-law; we do not see any evidence for a break between 1.24 and 4.3 days after the burst. We discuss these measurements in the light of several models of GRB afterglows.Comment: submitted to ApJ