Progress 04/01/21 to 03/31/25
Outputs
Target Audience:The primary target audiences for this project were (1) conservation practitioners and (2) academics working in resource economics and conservation biology. (1) Conservation Practitioners: We worked directly with non-governmental conservation groups throughout New England. Our efforts including giving presentations (described elsewhere in this report) and training them to use some of our web mapping tools. The NGO Conservation Groups included: The Mass Land Trust Collation, Mass Audubon, Appalachian Mountain Club, Lincoln Land Institute, Northeast Wilderness Trust, Highstead, Hispanic Outdoor Foundation and The Nature Conservancy. We also worked with government land management agencies throughout the region, including: the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs and The Maine Forest Service. (2) Academics: Our efforts to reach academics were primary accomplished via conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications. These products are described in detail elsewhere in this report. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Harvard Post Doctoral Fellow Alexey Kalinin was funded by this grants and conducted research on the influence of land protection on property taxes. He is now an Environmental Economist with the Dept of Reclamation in Colorado Harvard Post Doctoral Fellow Yuqi Song, was partially funded by this grant and conducted research on selection bias in forest carbon offset markets. She is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong Undergraduate Miranda Gonzalez was part of the 2023 Cohort of REU students at Harvard Forest and used data from this project for her research Eli McGill, Harvard Undergraduate wrote his thesis on the ecological impacts of Land Protection in Maine. Margot Lurie, Amherst Undergraduate wrote her thesis on Environmental Justice aspects of land protection How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?In addition to the peer reviewed academic publications listed in the prior section, we have disseminated our results in several conferences, lectures, websites, and popular periodicals. Conferences: Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting, 2024, Long Beach CA Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Annual Meeting, 2023, Portland ME Invited Lectures: University of Virginia, Environmental Science, Invited Seminar (Jan 2025) University of Vermont, Gund Institute, Invited Seminar (Jan 2025) Metro-West Climate Forum, Lincoln, MA (Oct 2024) Barre Climate Change Summit, Joint Keynote with State Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer (Oct 2024) National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg MD (Sept 2024) Harvard Club of West-Chester County, NY (July 2024) Lincoln Land Institute, Environmental Justice Forum (May 2023) University of Massachusetts, Dept. of Environmental Conservation Seminar, Amherst MA (Oct 2022) Property and Environment Research Center, Bozeman MT (July 2022) Websites: Incorperating environmental justice criteria for new land protection:https://bit.ly/EJ-OS-NE Periodicals: From the Ground Up.https://www.fromthegroundupne.org/ What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Our study of how land protection impacts property taxes is a great example where we set out to test the validity of a community concern about land protection that was really producing a lot of friction in town halls throughout the region. The long-held conventional wisdom suggests that because land protected (either through conservation restrictions or under fee ownership by public and non-profit organizations) is frequently tax-exempt or taxed at lower rates, it will erode local property tax bases and result in higher property tax rates for other landowners. This is a reasonable concern. However, there are reasons that this concern might not be warranted. For example, because protected lands require fewer government services--such as for police, roads, and schools--and because protection often lifts property values through the amenity effects I mentioned before, it might be that protecting land actually reduces property taxes. We decided to find out. We built and continue to maintain a database that combines information on property tax rates, property tax levies, taxable property value, and new protected lands for more than 1,400 municipalities in the region, spanning from 1990 to 2020. Analyzing these data, we see only small effects of land protection on property taxes. To put this in context, we found that, on average, 100 acres of new protection in a town is associated with an increase in a homeowner's annual property tax bill of just $1.16 per $100,000 of property value. But there are slightly greater impacts for towns that are growing slowly, have lower median household incomes, or fewer second homes. About a quarter of all the land in New England has some type of protected status. Given how much land is protected, you might think that everyone in the region would have access to protected open space and the benefits it provides. However, we know that many public goods are not equitably distributed. We used our protected lands database to ask whether there are disparities in access to protected open space by factors of social marginalization, like race and income. We found that households in census tracts in the lowest income quartile tend to have access to just half as much protected land as those in the highest quartile. Similarly, communities with the highest proportion of people of color have about 60 percent as much nearby protected land. These differences are not just reflecting the differences between the city and the country. In fact, these patterns persist across rural, exurban, and urban areas, and are present in historical as well as recent patterns of land protection. After documenting these patterns, we developed a web-based mapping tool that conservation groups and governments can use to assess the demographics around potential conservation sites. I've been super impressed with how many different organizations have embraced and are using the tool. Now, in the same way that conservationists assess the natural aspects of the land--for example, the habitat, water, and biodiversity--they can also assess who will most benefit from having new open space nearby. Fully 50 percent of the land conserved in New England since 1990 is located in the big blocks of so-called Working Forest Conservation Easements (WFCEs) in northern New England. Extremely large WFCEs--conserved industrialized timberlands owned largely by absentee investors--account for 70 percent of Maine's total conserved land and cover 839,000 hectares, approximately the s ize of Yellowstone National Park. Broadly, the easements on these large timberlands are structured like easements in southern New England or any other populated landscape; they focus on limiting the division and development of the land. Compared to Maine's forests as a whole, corporate-owned timberlands, whether protected by a WFCE or not, have a low rate of conversion to non-forest land cover. We use variation in the timing and location of easements to estimate the impacts of WFCEs in Maine from a 33-year time-series of forest loss and harvesting. We find that WFCEs had negligible impacts on an already low rate of forest loss. Compared to matched control areas, easements decreased forest loss by 0.0004% yr−1 (the equivalent of 3.17 ha yr−1 when scaled to the 839 142 ha of total conserved area. In contrast, WFCEs increased the rate of harvesting by 0.37% yr−1, or 3,105 ha yr−1 when scaled to the conserved area. However, more recently established easements contained stricter restrictions on harvest practices and stricter easements reduced harvest by 0.66% yr−1 . Our results suggest that future easements could be more effective if they were targeted to higher risk of loss areas and included additional provisions for harvest restrictions and monitoring. Our analysis of WFCE restrictions indicates that more restrictions have been imposed over time, and that stricter easements reduced harvest frequency...Effectiveness could be increased with changes in easement design and enforcement that prioritize areas under active threat from conversion and strengthen restrictions on unsustainable harvest practices." This caveat is important to recognize as it is possible to write conservation easements that do provide strict forestry guidelines that allow wood products to be harvested while protecting forest ecosystems, forest soils, and the environment.
Publications
- Type:
Other Journal Articles
Status:
Under Review
Year Published:
2026
Citation:
Song, Y., J. E. Aldy, N. M. Holbrook, J. R. Thompson. Entry choices and performance of forest-based carbon offset projects in regulated and voluntary carbon markets.
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Progress 04/01/23 to 03/31/24
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audiences that we have reached include academic environmental economists and ecologists, plus conservation practitioners, and this year in particular, state policy makersat theMassachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Harvard Undergraduate Eli McGill presented his thesis work (which was part of this study) at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting in Portland OR. The Protected Areas database that we created for this project was central to the Conservation BiologyGIS lab taught by PI Thompson How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?As listed in the products section, we presented this work at the annual Ecological society of America Meeting in Portland OR. We also have submitted the latest analysis (described above)to the journal Conservation Biology where it is currently in review. Our data and analyses were central to a major report on wildland conservation published by Harvard University (see products list), and this received considerable news coverage. Our data and analyses from this project were also a major component of a report to the Commonweath of Massachusetts as part of their Global Warming Solutions Act, Land Sec tor Analysis. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?In the upcoming final year of our grant Thompson and Sims are working on a synthesis of all the economic and ecological findings reported in this study. We plan to publish this synthesis in a top teir general science journal, like Nature Sustainability.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
In our latest analysis, we use the USDA Forest Inventory and Analysis plot level data for the period 1999 through 2019 to investigate the association between private and public land protection and a diverse set of ecological outcomes in the New England region of the United States, while controlling for potentially confounding variables using matching. We ask the following three questions: (1) To what extent are protected forests in the New England region of the United States distinct from environmentally similar but unprotected forests in terms of forest conditions that are associated with conservation value, ecosystem services and land use? (2) How do the differences vary across seven different protection types? (working forest easements, state, federal, non-working forest easements, NGO, municipal, wildland ) (3) Are the differences due to selection or treatment associated with protection status? Our analysis advances the protected area literature by shedding light on differences in forest structure between diverse types of protected areas and unprotected forest as well as the mechanisms behind those differences, elucidating the future potential of newly protected areas to maintain and improve ecosystem function and biodiversity which are closely linked to structural complexity. We found statistically significant differences in multiple outcomes between protected plots and matched controls using the last available year for each plot in our FIA data. We present means for each outcome by protection status and land ownership type, with regression-based tests of significance. On average, when considering all types of protection, protected plots had greater live basal area (2.07 m2 ha-1 or 10%, p<0.01), dead basal area (0.3 m2 ha-1 or 13%, p<0.05), more large live trees (0.54 trees or 19%, p<0.01), greater tree size diversity as measured by the Shannon structural index (0.07 or 4%, p<0.01), and lower annual probability of harvest (-0.01 or -30%, p<0.01). We observed no statistically significant overall differences between protected and unprotected forest for the following outcomes: basal area increment, large dead trees, percent basal area removed, adult and sapling tree species richness.
Publications
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Foster, D., E. E. Johnson, B. R. Hall, J. Leibowitz, E. H. Thompson, B. Donahue, E. K. Faison, J. Sayen, D. Publicover, N. Sferra, L. C. Irland, J. R. Thompson, R. Perschel, D. A. Orwig, W. S. Keeton, M. L. Hunter Jr., S. A. Masino, and L. Howell. 2023. Wildlands in New England. Past, Present, and Future. Harvard Forest Paper 34. Harvard University.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
McGill E. J. R. Thompson. Differences in vegetation composition among protected areas in Maine. 2024. Ecological Society of America, Annual Meeting. Portland Oregon
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Accepted
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Thompson, J. R., A. Kalinin, L. Lee, V. Pasquarella, J. Plisinski, K.R.E. Sims, Do working forest easements work for conservation Environmental Research Letters
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Under Review
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Kalinin A. K. R. E. Sims, J. R. Thompson "Ecological Effectiveness of Protected Forest Areas in New England". In Review at Conservation Biology
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Progress 04/01/22 to 03/31/23
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audiences that we have reached include academic environmental economists and ecologists, plus conservation practitioners from the public and private sectors. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Alexey Kalinin, a Co-PI and Post-Doctoral Fellow on the project published a first authored manuscript in a leading environmental economics journal. Miranda Gonzalez, a rising Senior at Simmons Collage,spent 11 weeks in the Summer of 2022 inHarvard Forest's NSF-FundedResearch Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) program where she analyzedprotection data as part of this project. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We presented our tax and working forest easement research at several meetings for academics and conservation professionals, including: Formal Presentations: Kalinin, A. Invited Talk at the Wisconsin Lakes and Rivers Partnership Meeting. June 2023 Thompson, J.R. Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) Seminar, July 2022 Thompson, J.R. Massachusetts Keystone Project. Seminar to Conservation Professional organized by Mass Extension. Kalinin, A. Seminar at University of Connecticut Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, November 2022 Media Coverage: A news article highlighting the findings of our property tax analysis will be published in the fall edition of the quarterly Northern Woodlands magazine, which focuses on northeastern forests and their stewardship. Thompson and Sims continued to meet periodically with several conservation organizations to discuss how our research applies to their organizations. Sims will be giving a presentation (with Neenah Estrella-Luna) to The Wilderness Society in mid July. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We will continue our analysis comparing forest conditions and forest land use on seven different types of protected land with environmentally similar but unprotected forestland. We will then shift to synthesizing the empirical work done for this project.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
We made considerable progress toward achieving the goals and objectives of this project in the past year. First, we advanced our goal of estimating economic impacts of land protection in New England by completing the review process and publishing our analysis of property tax impacts from new land protection in the May 2023 edition of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Second, we moved ahead with research on the ecological impacts of land conservation in three key ways. We have drafted a manuscript that describes our analysis of working forest conservation easements (WFCEs) impacts on timber harvest and land use change in Maine. In this study, we analyzed and coded the terms of easement restrictions and used co-variate pre-matching to examine a 33-year time-series of remotely sensed forest-loss and harvesting data. Overall, we found little evidence that WFCEs impacted land-use practices. However, we found heterogeneous impacts related to strictness of easement terms, where more restrictions on land use and harvest were associated with greater harvest reductions post easement. We also completed a study that compared forest conditions within "wildland" designations that prohibit timber harvesting, to environmentally comparable unprotected forests. This study used USDA forest inventory and analysis (FIA) data and utilized matching to identify comparable FIA plots within wildlands and unprotected forestlands. We found that aboveground carbon was 20% greater in wildlands. Structural complexity, which is associated with greater adaptation capacity and includes variables like the count of large trees, maximum tree height and diversity of tree diameter size classes diversity, was generally greater on wildlands as well. These results highlight the benefits of prioritizing natural processes over management for wood products. Additionally, we are finalizing an analysis that examines differences in forest conditions between seven types of protected lands (working forest easements, state, federal, easements on private land (excluding working forest easements), NGO, municipal and wildland,) and unprotected forestland. In this study, we analyze variation in Forest Inventory and Analysis data with respect to conservation status and ownership/type of protected land. We use covariate pre-matching to select environmentally similar protected and control FIA plots, then test for differences between protected and control plots in structural attributes and harvest outcomes using regression analysis. We find compelling differences in forest conditions between protected and unprotected forestland and show that at least for more recently protected lands (since 1999) selection of land for protection is not the primary driver of differences. Third, we moved forward on our objective of synthesizing impacts of land protection across different community types with an article that reviews evidence on the challenges posed by land protection to social equity and proposes policy solutions. This research was prepared for a keynote presentation at a NIFA funded conference and the corresponding article is forthcoming in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review. Fourth, we substantially revised the manuscript that compares approaches for generating maps of forest harvest events from multi-spectral LandTrendr segmentation results and resubmitted it again for review. It is now under review at the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. Fifth, we started working with Infogroup data to analyze impacts of land conservation on business formation. We spent considerable time cleaning the data due to duplicate observations and missing or inconsistent attributes. Unfortunately, despite these extensive efforts, our preliminary analyses indicated inconsistent results that were not robust to small changes in assumptions. This was disappointing as we were very interested in the business formation possibilities from protected areas. No other similar datasets are available within our institutional subscriptions or within our budget. We moved on to other project objectives.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Faison E.K., D. Laflower, L.L. Morreale, D.R. Foster, B. Hall, E. Johnson and J.R. Thompson. 2023 Adaptation and mitigation capacity of wildland forests in the northeastern United States. Forest Ecology and Management 544, 121145
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Sims, K. 2023. Towards equity in land protection. Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, 1-30. doi:10.1017/age.2023.18 Available online June 2023
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Kalinin, A.V, K.R.E. Sims, S.R. Meyer, J.R. Thompson, 2023. Does land conservation raise property taxes? Evidence from New England cities and towns. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 119, 102782
- Type:
Book Chapters
Status:
Under Review
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Pasquarella, V., L. Morreale, C. Brown, J. Kilbride, J. R. Thompson. Not-so-random forests: Comparing voting and decision tree ensemble approaches for characterizing harvest events in complex forested landscapes. In Revision at International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation.
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Progress 04/01/21 to 03/31/22
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audiences that we have reached include academic environmental economists and ecologists, plus conservation practitioners from the public and private sectors. We were very successful in our outreach to these groups and many of the interactions are listed in the "Accomplishments" section of this report. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?During the Summer of 2022, PI Thompson is mentoring Miranda Fernandez, an undergraduate student from Simmons College, who is part of the Harvard Forest Summer Research Program in Ecology, an 11-week immersive research experience connecting undergraduate students to mentors and researchers in the pursuit of scientific inquiry?. Miranda summer project is part of this USDA land protection study, expanding the Environmental Justice in Conservation analysis we published in 2022. Margot Lurie was a Senior Environmental Studies major at Amherst College, advised by Co-PI Sims who wrote her senior thesis on Environmental Justice in Land Protection and was a co-author on our ERL publication. Co-PI Kalinin received a Lone Star Fellowship at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a conservation and research institute dedicated to free market environmentalism in Bozeman, Montana. Kalinin spent two weeks at PERC working on and presenting our analysis of property tax impacts of land protection and networking with environmental economists. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We presentedour tax and environmental justice research at several meetings for acedemics and conservation professionals, including: Formal Presentations: Kalinin A. 2021 Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) Summer Conference, Online Kalinin A. 2021 Northeast Agricultural and Resource Economics Association Annual Meeting, Online Kalinin A.2021 Camp Resources XXVII, Ashville, NC Kalinin A. and J. ThompsonHarvest Forest Lab Group, 2021 Kalinin A. Dept. of Resource Economic University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Departmental Seminar, 2020 Kalinin A.Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) Seminar, 2021 Thompson, J. R. and A. Kalinin A.Massachusetts Open Space Conference, 2022 put on by the Massachusetts Open Space Network Sims K. and J. R. Thompson, Lincoln Land Institute, Cambridge MA June 2022 Sims K.Northeast Agricultural and Resource Economics Association Annual Meeting, Mystic CT Thompsno and Sims also met (often over Zoom) with several conservation organizations to discuss how our research applies to their organizations. These included: Trust for Public Land, Open Space Institute, The Nature Conservancy, Massachusetts Hispanic Access Foundation, The Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Mt. Grace Land Trust Kestral Land Trust Highstead Foundation Our work was directly used for consevation planning by the Applancian Mountain Club and the Royal River Conservation Trust in Maine and by the Friends of Conte National Wildlife Refuge. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We have begun analyzing differences in harvest frequency and intensity among different types of land protection, with an emphasis on understanding the efficacy of large "working forestland" easements. We have now assembled all the business data from InfoGroup and are beginning to analyze the impacts of land protection on business formation. We also have assembled on the ecological metrics from the US Forest Service Inventory data and plan to analyze variation in carbon and forest structure among different types of land protection. We have just begun to think about the spillover analysis and the integration of ecological and economic outcomes, but plan to make substantial progress on these facets of the research over the coming year.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
We made substantial progress toward achieving the goals and objectives of this project. With regard to estimating the social and economic impacts of land protection in New England, we completed two major analyses. First, we estimated the impacts of new land protection on local property tax rates in New England between 1990 and 2015. To do this, we assemble an annual panel at the municipal level. We combined data on municipal fiscal outcomes, land protection, land with current use tax breaks, and socio-economic characteristics from 1990-2015 for 1436 municipalities throughout the New England region. We found that although new protection was substantial, these resulted in small average impacts on tax rates. The average annual area of new protection of 85 acres was associated with an increase in a homeowner's annual tax bill of just $0.72 per $100,000 of property value. Although average impacts are small, we observe substantial heterogeneity in impacts by land protection type and local characteristics, with magnitudes ranging from $5 to $30 per $100,000 of value. We found greater impacts for towns that were growing slowly, had lower median household incomes, or fewer second homes. Overall, our findings indicate that tax rate changes due to land protection are generally not substantial, particularly in comparison to the magnitude of changes that residents experience for capital projects such as new buildings or increases in municipal staff. Yet the heterogeneity in impacts highlights the importance of understanding where expected tax rate increases are likely to be greater. They also emphasize the importance of public compensation mechanisms, such as state and federal payments in lieu of taxes, that can assist communities engaging in land protection, and a rationale for targeting these programs to the types of communities that may be most impacted by new land protection. Next, in the context of increasing social awareness of environmental justice (EJ) issues, we estimated demographic differences in who has access to protected land, we developed tools for conservation practitioners to incorporate EJ concerns into planning, and we examined whether and how an EJ focus would shift priorities for new land protection. Specifically, using data from the US Community Survey, we show striking disparities in the distribution of protected open space across multiple dimensions of social marginalization. Communities in the lowest income quartile have just 52% as much nearby protected land as those in the most affluent quartile. Similarly, communities with the highest proportions of people of color have just 47% as much protected land as those in the lowest quartile. These disparities persist across both public and private protected land, within urban, exurban and rural communities, for different sized buffers around communities, and across time. We developed a web-based public screening tool to identify and map communities with high social marginalization and low nearby protected open space within each state. Finally, we showed that areas prioritized according to EJ criteria are substantially different from areas prioritized according to conventional conservation criteria, which demonstrates how an EJ emphasis could shift patterns of future land protection. Our work provides methods that can be used broadly across regions to inform conservation efforts. Concurrent with the social and economic analyses, we advanced the research into the ecological impacts of land protection in New England. The largest part of this work was developing an approach for mapping a time series of harvests and other land uses, which we will use to compare ecological impacts among protected areas. As described in our proposal, we compared approaches for generating maps of potential forest harvest events from multi-spectral LandTrendr segmentation results: (1) simple voting strategies, (2) a generic 500-tree Random Forest, and (3) an ensemble of degenerate decision trees. We evaluated these approaches in the context of detecting forest harvest events of varying magnitudes using forest inventory measurements from the United States Forest Service (USFS) Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) as a training and validation dataset. We found supervised decision tree methods consistently outperformed simple combinatorial voting approaches. Comparisons ofto FIA data indicated notable improvements in accuracy that justify time and resources required to develop new application-specific products. Our resulting product is a series of annual 30 meter resolution maps showing every forest harvest that removed greater than 30% of the woody biomass between 1988 and 2020 in northern New England. We have now begun analyzing differences in harvest frequency and intensity among different types of land protection (e.g., federal land, land trust, state land).
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Sims, K. R. E., Lee, L. G., Estrella-Luna, N., Lurie, M., Thompson, J. R. 2022. Environmental justice criteria for new land protection can inform efforts to address disparities in access to nearby open space. Environmental Research Letters 17: 064014.
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Under Review
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Kalinin A., Sims, K. Meyer, S. and J. R. Thompson. "Does land conservation raise property taxes? Evidence from New England cities and towns" In Revision at Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM)
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Under Review
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Pasquarella, V., L. Morreale, C. Brown, J. Kilbride, J. R. Thompson. Not-so-random forests: Comparing voting and decision tree ensemble approaches for characterizing harvest events in complex forested landscapes. In Revision at Remote Sensing for Environment
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