The cost-efficiency of payments for environmental services (PES) to private landowners in the Osa Conservation Area, Costa Rica, is evaluated in terms of the trade-off between biodiversity representation and opportunity costs of conservation to agricultural and forestry land-use. Using available GIS data and an ‘off-the-shelf’ software application called TARGET, we find that the PES allocation criteria applied by authorities in 2002–2003 were more than twice as cost-efficient as criteria applied during 1999–2001.

Nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) landowners own the majority of timberlands in the southern United States. As forest certification becomes more prevalent, it is important to understand the implications for NIPF landowners. This study, conducted in 2005-2006, reveals how well NIPF landowners in Louisiana and Mississippi understand forest certification, willingness to pay to become certified, and general perceptions about the certification process and implementation requirements.

New land reforms are again high on the policy agenda and low-cost, propoor reforms are being tested in poor countries. This article assesses the investment and productivity impacts of the recent low-cost land certification implemented in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, using a unique household and farm-plot-level panel data set, with data from before and up to eight years after the reform. Alternative econometric methods were used to test and control for endogeneity of certification and for unobserved household heterogeneity.

Deep, linear gullies are a common feature of the present landscape of the Karoo of South Africa, where they were known locally in the early twentieth century as ‘sluits’. Recent research has shown that many of these features are now stable and are no longer significant sediment sources, although they are efficient connectors in the landscape. Because most of the gully networks predate the first aerial photographs, little is known in the scientific literature about the timing of their formation.

The Washington State Department of Ecology (WSDE) has set very strict standards for utilization of both ground water and surface water. In the absence of a valid Water Right Permit rural landowners can only draw up to 5,000 gal per day from a well. In 2009, however, WSDE passed a new law stating that the landowners can capture rainwater (rain water harvesting) from their farm buildings and use it for irrigation purposes, without having to go through the elaborate process of applying for and possibly being denied a Water Right permit.

Local forest landowner associations and broader peer-to-peer learning efforts have received attention-particularly in the United States of America-as ways to increase landowner engagement in forest planning and management. Unlike traditional technical assistance and outreach, knowledge is primarily shared among landowners as opposed to being derived from natural resource professionals. While potentially promising, few studies have investigated these approaches.

We present a bioeconomic model for moose Alces alces management in Norway, where two sub-populations of moose are subject to different site-specific mortality rates caused by the spatial distribution of territorial wolf Canis lupus packs, and are coupled by the seasonal migration of moose. The costs and benefits of moose are asymmetrically distributed in space, since they congregate in the wolf territory during winter where most browsing damage occurs.

Information on the effect of direct drivers such as hurricanes on ecosystem services is relevant to landowners and policy makers due to predicted effects from climate change. We identified forest damage risk zones due to hurricanes and estimated the potential loss of 2 key ecosystem services: aboveground carbon storage and timber volume.

A robust supply chain is critical to ensure a sustainable supply of feedstock to the existing and emerging bioenergy and bioproducts industries. Logging contractors are a key group in this process, since they provide harvesting and transportation services, and their success is directly linked to innovation activities. Surprisingly, very little is known about the innovation system in the logging industry-especially about how it relates to biomass supply.

Leading climate change experts within the international scientific community support the use of forest carbon sinks as a climate change mitigation tool. Functioning regulatory and voluntary carbon offset frameworks within the United States recognize forest offsets with varying levels of stringency. Emerging carbon emission reduction legislation outlines a regulatory cap-and-trade system with provisions for significant domestic forest-related offsets.