Van Butsic
University of California, Berkeley
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Ecological Applications | 2012
Volker C. Radeloff; Erik Nelson; Andrew J. Plantinga; David J. Lewis; David P. Helmers; Joshua J. Lawler; John C. Withey; Frederic Beaudry; Sebastián Martinuzzi; Van Butsic; Eric Lonsdorf; Denis White; Stephen Polasky
Land-use change significantly contributes to biodiversity loss, invasive species spread, changes in biogeochemical cycles, and the loss of ecosystem services. Planning for a sustainable future requires a thorough understanding of expected land use at the fine spatial scales relevant for modeling many ecological processes and at dimensions appropriate for regional or national-level policy making. Our goal was to construct and parameterize an econometric model of land-use change to project future land use to the year 2051 at a fine spatial scale across the conterminous United States under several alternative land-use policy scenarios. We parameterized the econometric model of land-use change with the National Resource Inventory (NRI) 1992 and 1997 land-use data for 844 000 sample points. Land-use transitions were estimated for five land-use classes (cropland, pasture, range, forest, and urban). We predicted land-use change under four scenarios: business-as-usual, afforestation, removal of agricultural subsidies, and increased urban rents. Our results for the business-as-usual scenario showed widespread changes in land use, affecting 36% of the land area of the conterminous United States, with large increases in urban land (79%) and forest (7%), and declines in cropland (-16%) and pasture (-13%). Areas with particularly high rates of land-use change included the larger Chicago area, parts of the Pacific Northwest, and the Central Valley of California. However, while land-use change was substantial, differences in results among the four scenarios were relatively minor. The only scenario that was markedly different was the afforestation scenario, which resulted in an increase of forest area that was twice as high as the business-as-usual scenario. Land-use policies can affect trends, but only so much. The basic economic and demographic factors shaping land-use changes in the United States are powerful, and even fairly dramatic policy changes, showed only moderate deviations from the business-as-usual scenario. Given the magnitude of predicted land-use change, any attempts to identify a sustainable future or to predict the effects of climate change will have to take likely land-use changes into account. Econometric models that can simulate land-use change for broad areas with fine resolution are necessary to predict trends in ecosystem service provision and biodiversity persistence.
PLOS ONE | 2013
Alexandra D. Syphard; Avi Bar Massada; Van Butsic; Jon E. Keeley
Increasing numbers of homes are being destroyed by wildfire in the wildland-urban interface. With projections of climate change and housing growth potentially exacerbating the threat of wildfire to homes and property, effective fire-risk reduction alternatives are needed as part of a comprehensive fire management plan. Land use planning represents a shift in traditional thinking from trying to eliminate wildfires, or even increasing resilience to them, toward avoiding exposure to them through the informed placement of new residential structures. For land use planning to be effective, it needs to be based on solid understanding of where and how to locate and arrange new homes. We simulated three scenarios of future residential development and projected landscape-level wildfire risk to residential structures in a rapidly urbanizing, fire-prone region in southern California. We based all future development on an econometric subdivision model, but we varied the emphasis of subdivision decision-making based on three broad and common growth types: infill, expansion, and leapfrog. Simulation results showed that decision-making based on these growth types, when applied locally for subdivision of individual parcels, produced substantial landscape-level differences in pattern, location, and extent of development. These differences in development, in turn, affected the area and proportion of structures at risk from burning in wildfires. Scenarios with lower housing density and larger numbers of small, isolated clusters of development, i.e., resulting from leapfrog development, were generally predicted to have the highest predicted fire risk to the largest proportion of structures in the study area, and infill development was predicted to have the lowest risk. These results suggest that land use planning should be considered an important component to fire risk management and that consistently applied policies based on residential pattern may provide substantial benefits for future risk reduction.
Land Economics | 2011
Van Butsic; David J. Lewis; Lindsay Ludwig
Zoning is a widely used tool to manage residential growth. Estimating the effect of zoning on development, however, is difficult because zoning can be endogenous in models of land conversion. We compare three econometric methods that account for selection bias in a model of land conversion: a jointly estimated probit-logit model, propensity score matching, and regression discontinuity. Our results suggest that not accounting for selection bias leads to erroneous estimates. After correcting for selection bias we find that zoning has no effect on a landowner’s decision to subdivide in a rural Wisconsin county. (JEL Q24, R14)
Land Economics | 2011
Van Butsic; Ellen Hanak; Robert G. Valletta
We apply a hedonic framework to estimate and simulate the impact of global warming on real estate prices near ski resorts in the western United States and Canada. Using data on housing values for selected U.S. Census tracts and individual home sales in four locations, combined with detailed weather data and characteristics of nearby ski resorts, we find precise and consistent estimates of positive snowfall effects on housing values. Simulations based on these estimates reveal substantial heterogeneity in the likely impact of climate change across regions, including large reductions in home prices near resorts where snow reliability already is low. (JEL Q54, R21)
Ecological Applications | 2015
Van Butsic; Tobias Kuemmerle
Aligning food production with biodiversity conservation is one of the greatest challenges of our time. One framing of this challenge is the land-sharing vs. land-sparing debate. Much empirical research has focused on identifying the relationship between agricultural yields and species populations, and using the relative number of species with particular relationships to inform landscape-level management. We feel this is misguided, as such an approach does not guarantee the existence of every species of conservation concern. Here, we show that constrained optimization methods can be used to identify landscape-level solutions which maximize agricultural yields and populations for any number of species. Our results suggest that the relative number of species with particular yield-density curves is not a good indicator as to how landscapes should be managed. Likewise, choosing between blanket sharing or sparing strategies leads to suboptimal outcomes at the landscape scale in many cases. Our framework makes maximum use of the rich information contained in yield-density curves to move beyond black-and-white choices and toward more nuanced, context-specific solutions to aligning biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. Such optimal landscapes will likely have features of both sharing and sparing strategies.
Conservation Biology | 2012
Van Butsic; Volker C. Radeloff; Tobias Kuemmerle; Anna M. Pidgeon
Land-use change is affecting Earths capacity to support both wild species and a growing human population. The question is how best to manage landscapes for both species conservation and economic output. If large areas are protected to conserve species richness, then the unprotected areas must be used more intensively. Likewise, low-intensity use leaves less area protected but may allow wild species to persist in areas that are used for market purposes. This dilemma is present in policy debates on agriculture, housing, and forestry. Our goal was to develop a theoretical model to evaluate which land-use strategy maximizes economic output while maintaining species richness. Our theoretical model extends previous analytical models by allowing land-use intensity on unprotected land to influence species richness in protected areas. We devised general models in which species richness (with modified species-area curves) and economic output (a Cobb-Douglas production function) are a function of land-use intensity and the proportion of land protected. Economic output increased as land-use intensity and extent increased, and species richness responded to increased intensity either negatively or following the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. We solved the model analytically to identify the combination of land-use intensity and protected area that provided the maximum amount of economic output, given a target level of species richness. The land-use strategy that maximized economic output while maintaining species richness depended jointly on the response of species richness to land-use intensity and protection and the effect of land use outside protected areas on species richness within protected areas. Regardless of the land-use strategy, species richness tended to respond to changing land-use intensity and extent in a highly nonlinear fashion.
Ecological Applications | 2010
Van Butsic; David J. Lewis; Volker C. Radeloff
Housing growth has been widely shown to be negatively correlated with wildlife populations, avian richness, anadromous fish, and exotic invasion. Zoning is the most frequently used public policy to manage housing development and is often motivated by a desire to protect the environment. Zoning is also pervasive, taking place in all 50 states. One relevant question that has received little research concerns the effectiveness of zoning to meet ecological goals. In this paper, we examined whether minimum frontage zoning policies have made a positive impact on the lakes they were aimed to protect in Vilas County, Wisconsin, U.S.A. We used an economic model that estimated when a given lot will be subdivided and how many new lots will be created as a function of zoning. Using the economic model, we simulated the effects of multiple zoning scenarios on lakeshore development. The simulated development patterns were then input to ecological models that predicted the amount of coarse woody debris (CWD) and the growth rate of bluegills as a function of residential density. Comparison of the ecological outcomes under different simulated zoning scenarios quantified the effect of zoning policies on residential density, CWD, and bluegill growth rates. Our results showed that zoning significantly affected residential density, CWD counts, and bluegill growth rates across our study area, although the effect was less clear at the scale of individual lake. Our results suggest that homogeneous zoning (i.e., for a county) is likely to have mixed results when applied to a heterogeneous landscape. Further, our results suggest that zoning regimes with a higher minimum shoreline frontage are likely to have larger ecological effects when applied to lakes that are less developed.
Environmental Research Letters | 2016
Van Butsic; Jacob C. Brenner
Cannabis agriculture is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States that is changing rapidly with policy liberalization. Anecdotal observations fuel speculation about associated environmental impacts, and there is an urgent need for systematic empirical research. An example from Humboldt County California, a principal cannabis-producing region, involved digitizing 4428 grow sites in 60 watersheds with Google Earth imagery. Grows were clustered, suggesting disproportionate impacts in ecologically important locales. Sixty-eight percent of grows were >500 m from developed roads, suggesting risk of landscape fragmentation. Twenty-two percent were on steep slopes, suggesting risk of erosion, sedimentation, and landslides. Five percent were <100 m from threatened fish habitat, and the estimated 297 954 plants would consume an estimated 700 000 m3 of water, suggesting risk of stream impacts. The extent and magnitude of cannabis agriculture documented in our study demands that it be regulated and researched on par with conventional agriculture.
Journal of Environmental Management | 2013
Van Butsic; David J. Lewis; Volker C. Radeloff
How to best site reserves is a leading question for conservation biologists. Recently, reserve selection has emphasized efficient conservation: maximizing conservation goals given the reality of limited conservation budgets, and this work indicates that land market can potentially undermine the conservation benefits of reserves by increasing property values and development probabilities near reserves. Here we propose a reserve selection methodology which optimizes conservation given both a budget constraint and land market feedbacks by using a combination of econometric models along with stochastic dynamic programming. We show that amenity based feedbacks can be accounted for in optimal reserve selection by choosing property price and land development models which exogenously estimate the effects of reserve establishment. In our empirical example, we use previously estimated models of land development and property prices to select parcels to maximize coarse woody debris along 16 lakes in Vilas County, WI, USA. Using each lake as an independent experiment, we find that including land market feedbacks in the reserve selection algorithm has only small effects on conservation efficacy. Likewise, we find that in our setting heuristic (minloss and maxgain) algorithms perform nearly as well as the optimal selection strategy. We emphasize that land market feedbacks can be included in optimal reserve selection; the extent to which this improves reserve placement will likely vary across landscapes.
Conservation Biology | 2017
Van Butsic; Catalina Munteanu; Patrick Griffiths; Jan Knorn; Volker C. Radeloff; Juraj Lieskovský; Daniel Mueller; Tobias Kuemmerle
Protected areas are a cornerstone for forest protection, but they are not always effective during times of socioeconomic and institutional crises. The Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe are an ecologically outstanding region, with widespread seminatural and old-growth forest. Since 1990, Carpathian countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine) have experienced economic hardship and institutional changes, including the breakdown of socialism, European Union accession, and a rapid expansion of protected areas. The question is how protected-area effectiveness has varied during these times across the Carpathians given these changes. We analyzed a satellite-based data set of forest disturbance (i.e., forest loss due to harvesting or natural disturbances) from 1985 to 2010 and used matching statistics and a fixed-effects estimator to quantify the effect of protection on forest disturbance. Protected areas in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Ukraine had significantly less deforestation inside protected areas than outside in some periods; the likelihood of disturbance was reduced by 1-5%. The effectiveness of protection increased over time in these countries, whereas the opposite was true in Romania. Older protected areas were most effective in Romania and Hungary, but newer protected areas were more effective in Czech Republic, and Poland. Strict protection (International Union for Conservation of Nature [IUCN] protection category Ia-II) was not more effective than landscape-level protection (IUCN III-VI). We suggest that the strength of institutions, the differences in forest privatization, forest management, prior distribution of protected areas, and when countries joined the European Union may provide explanations for the strikingly heterogeneous effectiveness patterns among countries. Our results highlight how different the effects of protected areas can be at broad scales, indicating that the effectiveness of protected areas is transitory over time and space and suggesting that generalizations about the effectiveness of protected areas can be misleading.