Private land trusts play an increasingly important role in the provision of environmental amenities and services in the U.S. Surprisingly little analysis of their behavior exists, however. This project will characterize land trust behavior with models and data, and identify policies that could encourage trusts to conserve land in a manner that is most socially beneficial. The research will examine the land conservation decisions of private land trusts, focusing on the extent to which they consider the land conservation actions of other actors, both public and private. The project will consist of two components of analysis that inform each other, one empirical and one modeling. The empirical work will use econometric techniques to examine actual private-public land conservation interactions in each of three data-rich states (California, Massachusetts, and Illinois) that have important differences in their ecology, conservation goals, and amounts of privately and publicly conserved land. The modeling work will construct and analyze a spatially-explicit simulation model of the land conservation decisions made by diverse land trusts and public actors, characterize the resulting pattern of conservation, and explore policy options.
These analyses will increase understanding of how private land trusts, which provide so many environmental benefits, make decisions. From the foundation of data-based models, the project will inform policy by: determining the extent to which land trusts make decisions based on information about other land conservation actions; examining the impact of information exchange and coordination among diverse land trusts and between trusts and government; and identifying the role of government protected lands in encouraging ("crowding in") or discouraging ("crowding out") private land conservation. The research will be particularly useful in considering two different types of policy. First, the analysis will determine a role for government in disseminating ecological and land use information. Second, the analysis will identify situations in which strategic land purchases and the promotion of coordinated actions among public and private groups are policies that increase the private provision of environmental services. Adding these policies to the portfolio of current land conservation policies could decrease the costs of achieving a more desirable level of land conservation and environmental benefits. This research is supported under the FY 2002 NSF/EPA Decision Making for Valuation and Environmental Policy (DMVEP) special competition.
