Economic analyses of residential development and land conservation trends

This research uses economic theory and empirical approaches to inform land management issues, including land use change and land conservation.  The first chapter integrates an economic model of residential development with the output of a stakeholder-driven process to identify conservation objectives.  It connects insights from an academic literature focused on improving the modeling of land use change with the efforts of the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a non-government organization focused on gauging community assessments of priority conservation areas.  We examine what factors are driving residential growth in a selection of Penobscot Valley municipalities (Bangor, Hampden, and Hermon, Maine) using an empirical model of residential development.  We then employ the results of our model in a simulation framework to make predictions about the future landscape.  Our results suggest that TPL priority lands are at risk from future housing development and that the extent of this risk varies with the assumed policies.  If government and nonprofit organizations provide conservation, looking at these lands through an economic lens can help improve the efficiency of decision-making about them.  Furthermore, local governments, land conservationists, and regional planners would consider the benefits and costs of conservation, as well as the likelihood of development. 

The second chapter looks at the response of public and private agents engaging in land conservation.  We focus on conservation provided by land trusts and contribute to the emerging literature on land trusts by assessing patterns in local private conservation.  We employ applied economics and qualitative research techniques to explain the spatial variation in acreage conserved by land trusts across Maine communities.  Our results confirm our expectations about the role scarcity in explaining the variation in land trust acreage across Maine communities.  This work improves the understanding about conservation land in Maine by describing the spatial distribution and investigating relationships between local land trust acreage, factors related to the community, resource, institutional characteristics, and conservation acreage by other groups.