9416809 Whitelaw This project's objectives fall into three groups: Descriptive objective: to develop a technically sound, but intuitively accessible, framework and language for describing and assessing the multiple relationships between a forested ecosystem and a regional economy that can be applied to different ecosystems and regional economies. Explanatory objective: to improve understanding of the factors that influence the multiple relationships between forested ecosystems and regional economies. Institutional-communicative objective: to lay the institutional foundation for (1) providing resource managers, policymakers, and the public with effective tools for describing and assessing the economic effects of changes in resource-management policy, (2) undertaking further cross-site research regarding the relationships between ecosystems and regional economies, and (3) integrating economics research with the research of other disciplines. The proposed project will pursue these objectives by implementing, for these six LTER sites.
