PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - E. A. Frimpong
AU  - J. G. Lee
AU  - A. L. Ross-Davis
TI  - Floodplain influence on the cost of riparian buffers and implications for conservation programs
DP  - 2007 Jan 01
TA  - Journal of Soil and Water Conservation
PG  - 33--39
VI  - 62
IP  - 1
4099  - http://www.jswconline.org/content/62/1/33.short
4100  - http://www.jswconline.org/content/62/1/33.full
AB  - This study demonstrates an approach to estimating riparian buffer costs based on differences in prices between floodplain and off-floodplain land and the probability that a stream of a given order is located in a floodplain. Applying this approach to the Upper Wabash River Basin in north-central Indiana, we show that riparian buffers are less costly with increasing stream order because of increasing susceptibility of land to flooding and corresponding decrease in land price. The current distribution of forest in the watershed supports this conclusion, showing higher-order streams are buffered more completely compared to lower-order streams. We recommend the following: 1) that greater attention be focused on non-floodplain landowners along lower-order streams who tend to farm to stream banks; 2) that programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program consider explicitly incorporating flood risk in determining agricultural land values for rental payments; and 3) that large scale riparian restoration projects consider flood risk as a potentially significant component of the opportunity cost of taking riparian land out of agricultural production.