ABSTRACT:
American society derives many benefits from farmland and is often willing to pay to preserve it from urbanization. We present an innovative framework to support farmland preservation programs in prioritizing conservation investments. The framework considers the full range of social benefits of farmland and improves the application of decision analysis methods to the process. Key factors for ranking farms are: 1) social objectives and priorities, 2) how much farmland value is expected to be lost to development if not preserved, 3) how much farmland value is already secured in the agricultural region, and 4) how much it will cost to secure the farm's benefits. The framework can be applied strategically over an entire region or to rank a set of applications from landowners. We demonstrate our framework using three criteria in the Bay Area/Delta bioregion of California.
Footnotes
Elia A. Machado is currently a graduate student at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. David M. Stoms is an associate researcher for the Institute for Computational Earth System Science, Frank W. Davis is a professor for the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, and Jason Kreitler is a Ph.D. student for the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, all at the University of California in Santa Barbara, California.
- Copyright 2006 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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