Valuing and Rewarding Ecosystem Services From Rangelands

Valuing Ecosystem Services

We develop the economist’s concept of value as opportunity cost and discuss the ways in which decisions imply values through revealed preference. We distinguish between the ideas of incremental and total value and argue that only the former is of importance in practical decision-making. The relationship between price and value is articulated and related to the distinction between public and pri...

Ecosystem Services and Western U .S . Rangelands

Rangelands are expansive, unimproved lands located in arid or semi–arid regions, spanning a variety of landscapes including savannahs, high and low altitude deserts, mountain meadows, and tundra. Rangelands are generally unsuitable for crop production due to aridity, topography, and extreme temperatures. Rangelands support varying mixtures of native and nonnative grasses, grass–like plants, for...

Valuing Ecosystem Services with Fishery Rents:

Valuing ecosystem services with microeconomic underpinnings presents challenges because these services typically constitute nonmarket values and contribute to human welfare indirectly through a series of ecological pathways that are dynamic, nonlinear, and difficult to quantify and link to appropriate economic spatial and temporal scales. This paper develops and demonstrates a method to value a...

Valuing Ecosystem Services from Forests: A Multidisplinary Field-Based Approach

Land-use regimes vary throughout the world. Within the forest land-use regime there are several broad management strategies. Diverse views are prevalent about the superiority of one forest management strategy over the others, especially in relation to net benefits. These debates about net benefit cannot be solved from the current body of literature as they are mostly concluded by summing market...

Rangelands in Arid Ecosystem