Socio-psychological factors influencing intent to adopt conservation practices in the Minnesota River Basin.

In the upper Midwestern United States, one of the central goals of agri-environmental policy is to reduce environmental and water quality degradation resulting from agriculture without sacrificing production. The primary tool available to policymakers is offering farmers incentives to voluntarily adopt more conservation practices, often known as Best Management Practices (BMPs). Using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Diffusion of Innovation (DoI) frameworks, we surveyed 2000 agricultural landowners in the Minnesota River Basin to explore the socio-psychological drivers of the adoption decisions for specific BMPs such as wetlands, cover crops, and nutrient management.

Integrated assessment modeling reveals near-channel management as cost-effective to improve water quality in agricultural watersheds.

Despite decades of policy that strives to reduce nutrient and sediment export from agricultural fields, surface water quality in intensively managed agricultural landscapes remains highly degraded. Recent analyses show that current conservation efforts are not sufficient to reverse widespread water degradation in Midwestern agricultural systems. Intensifying row crop agriculture and increasing climate pressure require a more integrated approach to water quality management that addresses diverse sources of nutrients and sediment and off-field mitigation actions.

Quantifying cumulative effectiveness of green stormwater infrastructure in improving water quality.

Stormwater runoff is one of the main sources of pollution in streams and receiving water bodies of major cities. Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) is a set of distributed stormwater best management practices that absorb excess water, filter out sediment and pollutants, and help recharge groundwater. Despite the increasing popularity of GSI as means of stormwater management, our knowledge of their cumulative performance is limited.

Forward-looking farmers owning multiple potential wetland restoration sites: implications for efficient restoration.

Wetland restoration can increase the provision of multiple non-market ecosystem services. Environmental and socio-economic factors need to be accounted for when land is withdrawn from agriculture and wetlands are restored. We build multi-objective optimization models to provide decision support for wetland restoration in the Le Sueur river watershed in Southern Minnesota.

Measuring recreational visitation at U.S. National Parks with crowd-sourced photographs.

Land managers rely on visitation data to inform policy and management decisions. However, visitation data is often costly and burdensome to obtain, and provides a limited depth of information. In this paper, we assess the validity of using crowd-sourced, online photographs to infer information about the habits and preferences of recreational visitors by comparing empirical data from the National Park Service to photograph data from the online platform Flickr for 38 National Parks in the western United States.

Paying for Forest Ecosystem Services: Voluntary Versus Mandatory Payments.

The emergence of new markets for forest ecosystem services can be a compelling opportunity for market diversification for private forest landowners, while increasing the provision of public goods from private lands. However, there is limited information available on the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for specific forest ecosystem services, particularly across different ecosystem market mechanisms. We utilize survey data from Oregon and Washington households to compare marginal WTP for forest ecosystem services and the total WTP for cost-effective bundles of forest ecosystem services obtained from a typical Pacific Northwest forest across two value elicitation formats representing two different ecosystem market mechanisms: an incentive-compatible choice experiment involving mandatory tax payments and a hypothetical private provision scenario modeled as eliciting contributions to the preferred forest management alternative via a provision point mechanism with a refund.

Cost-effective targeting of conservation investments to reduce the northern Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone.

A seasonally occurring summer hypoxic (low oxygen) zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico is the second largest in the world. Reductions in nutrients from agricultural cropland in its watershed are needed to reduce the hypoxic zone size to the national policy goal of 5,000 km(2) (as a 5-y running average) set by the national Gulf of Mexico Task Force's Action Plan. We develop an integrated assessment model linking the water quality effects of cropland conservation investment decisions on the more than 550 agricultural subwatersheds that deliver nutrients into the Gulf with a hypoxic zone model.

Spatial multiobjective optimization of agricultural conservation practices using a SWAT model and an evolutionary algorithm.

Finding the cost-efficient (i.e., lowest-cost) ways of targeting conservation practice investments for the achievement of specific water quality goals across the landscape is of primary importance in watershed management.

Least-cost control of agricultural nutrient contributions to the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone.

In 2008, the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, measuring 20 720 km2, was one of the two largest reported since measurement of the zone began in 1985. The extent of the hypoxic zone is related to nitrogen and phosphorous loadings originating on agricultural fields in the upper Midwest. This study combines the tools of evolutionary computation with a water quality model and cost data to develop a trade-off frontier for the Upper Mississippi River Basin specifying the least cost of achieving nutrient reductions and the location of the agricultural conservation practices needed.