Biodiversity conservation adaptation to climate change: Protecting the actors or the stage.

To be able to protect biodiversity in coming decades, conservation strategies need to consider what sites will be important for species not just today but also in the future. Different methods have been proposed to identify places that will be important for species in the future. Two of the most frequently used methods, ecological niche modeling and climate resilience, have distinct aims.

Where and When Carbon Storage can be Bought Cost Effectively from Private Forest Owners.

The role of time in estimating the cost of forest carbon is often ignored in the literature, nor does the literature address the issues of where and when the purchase of forest carbon storage becomes socially beneficial. In our study, we identify the spatial and temporal allocations of forest carbon investments that are socially beneficial based on empirical analysis. We use the Central and Southern Appalachian region in the Eastern United States as a case study over three periods (i.

Potential efficiency gains in payment programs from resolving spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the cost of supplying forest carbon.

The environmental benefits and costs of conservation policies often vary over space and through time. Accounting for this spatial and temporal heterogeneity has important implications for the potential cost effectiveness of different payment program designs. In this study, we examine the cost efficiency gain from spatial and temporal targeting in payment designs for forest carbon storage in the Central and Southern Appalachian Mountains in the Eastern United States.

Transumbilical Single-Incision Laparoscopic-Assisted Appendectomy (TULAA) Is Useful in Adults and Young Adolescents: Comparison with Multi-Port Laparoscopic Appendectomy.

Single-port laparoscopic appendectomy (SLA) in most previous studies has used intracorporeal excision of the appendix and needed a longer operative time than multi-port laparoscopic appendectomy (MLA), although SLA does have the potential benefit of an almost invisible scar within the umbilicus. Some studies have reported that extracorporeal transumbilical single-incision laparoscopic-assisted appendectomy (TULAA) in children took a considerably reduced operative time compared to MLA. We adopted TULAA in adults, adding routine dissection of the peritoneal attachment of the appendix.

Effects of Protected Area Size on Conservation Return on Investment.

The objective of this research is to examine how protected area size influences the conservation benefit and acquisition cost of creating a protected area, how the resulting effects influence the predicted rate of return on investment (ROI), and how those relationships change prioritization decision-making for selecting protected areas compared with decisions based only on conservation benefit and decisions based only on acquisition cost. The objective is accomplished in an econometric framework by analyzing the parcel-level acquisition cost and conservation benefit measured by the change in potential fragmentation patterns on the landscape resulting from protection. We focus on areas acquired by The Nature Conservancy in central and southern Appalachia, United States.

Factoring economic costs into conservation planning may not improve agreement over priorities for protection.

Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI) methods.

Measuring the value of air quality: application of the spatial hedonic model.

This study applies a hedonic model to assess the economic benefits of air quality improvement following the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment at the county level in the lower 48 United States. An instrumental variable approach that combines geographically weighted regression and spatial autoregression methods (GWR-SEM) is adopted to simultaneously account for spatial heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation. SEM mitigates spatial dependency while GWR addresses spatial heterogeneity by allowing response coefficients to vary across observations.

Valuation of spatial configurations and forest types in the southern appalachian highlands.

Site-specific estimates of the values of spatial configuration and forest composition are presented. Amenity values of forest patches are found to vary the most by urban and sprawling development patterns of specific areas and forest types. For example, smaller patches of deciduous forest are more highly valued in the urban and sprawling areas of Greensboro, North Carolina, whereas larger patches of deciduous forest are more highly valued in the urban and sprawling areas of Greenville, South Carolina.