Multiple approaches
Daily plans to tackle the issue from ecological, financial and institutional angles. Pejchar is leading the ecological efforts and plans to travel to Hawaii in January. While there, she will survey native plant and animal diversity on several sites with various degrees of tree cover, including pasture, restored forest and mature forest.
Doctoral student Joshua Goldstein is conducting the financial research. He is working with landowners to develop a financial model that depicts what land uses will yield the best balance of profit and ecological benefit. He plans to assess factors as varied as the market price of koa wood, the cost of restoring forest on grazing land and the cultural preferences of ranchers. By integrating these factors into a "decision analysis" model, Goldstein hopes to determine what tradeoffs will make koa forest restoration an attractive option.
Selling conservation
Daily knows that for landowners to buy into conservation, they have to view it as good for business. By applying sound economic principles to projects like koa restoration, she hopes to change the way we view our natural assets.
She already has had some success in Costa Rica, where a separate study determined that rainforests may be valuable to coffee farmers. In that study, published in the Aug. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Daily and her collaborators found that not only were coffee plants located near an intact rainforest more productive but the beans were also of higher quality. They traced this finding to the pollination services offered by rainforests, where native bees nest.
"We've been pretty narrow minded in how we extract benefit
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Contact: Mark Shwartz
mshwartz@stanford.edu
650-723-9296
Stanford University
8-Dec-2004