soil, a 3-dimensional component of the landscape, or simply a natural body in a soilscape with a given geopedological setting, was modeled by jenny as s = f (climate, organism, relief, parent material, time). to map such a complex body, the concept ‗pedon’ –the smallest volume that can be recognized as a soil had to be defined. classically, soil is known to function as provider, controller, reg...

Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, today I am introducing a bill to authorize a program to help states, local governments, and private groups protect open space while enabling ranchers and other private landowners to continue to use their lands for agriculture and other traditional uses. The bill, entitled the ‘‘Cooperative Landscape Conservation Act,’’ is based on provisions that were passed ...

While theory strongly suggests that restricting development rights should reduce land prices, empirical evidence of this effect has been notoriously hard to obtain. Indeed, largely based on this difficulty a Congressional committee has recently recommended that tax benefits for such restrictions be severely curtailed. We collect data on 131 land transactions in South Central Wisconsin, includin...

Profit-maximizing land developers are hypothesized to configure subdivisions to minimize the effects of a conservation regulation on developed land values, subject to their expectations about the demand for developed building lots. This hypothesis allows development of a hedonic price model that takes account of production adjustments. The model is applied to the Maryland Forest Conservation Ac...

Biodiversity conservation and agricultural production are often seen as mutually exclusive objectives. Strategies for reconciling them are intensely debated. We argue that harmonization between biodiversity conservation and crop production can be improved by increasing our understanding of the underlying relationships between them. We provide a general conceptual framework that links biodiversi...

The study develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the allocation of conservation funds via selectively o ering incentive payments to farmers for enrolling in one of two mutually exclusive agricultural conservation programs: retiring land from production or changing farming practices on land that remains in production. We investigate how the existence of a prexed budget allocation between ...

Effective conservation of biological diversity on private lands will require changes in land-use policy and development practice. Conservation development (CD) is an alternative form of residential development in which homes are built on smaller lots and clustered together and the remainder of the property is permanently protected for conservation purposes. We assessed the degree to which CD is...

Habitat loss is the most important threat to species survival, and the efficient selection of priority areas is fundamental for good systematic conservation planning. Using amphibians as a conservation target, we designed an innovative assessment strategy, showing that prioritization models focused on functional, phylogenetic, and taxonomic diversity can include cost-effectiveness-based assessm...

Indicators of land quality (LQIs) are being developed as a means to better coordinate actions on land related issues, such as land degradation. Economic and social indicators are already in regular use to support decision making at global, national and sub-national levels and in some cases for air and water quality, but few such indicators are available to assess, monitor and evaluate changes i...