ABSTRACT:
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.
Footnotes
Emmanuel A. Frimpong is a research scientist in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. John G. Lee is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Amy L. Ross-Davis is a postdoctoral research assistant in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, both at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
- Copyright 2007 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society