Providing food, timber, energy, housing, and other goods and services, while maintaining ecosystem functions and biodiversity that underpin their sustainable supply, is one of the great challenges of our time. Understanding the drivers of land-use change and how policies can alter land-use change will be critical to meeting this challenge....
Many ecosystem services are public goods whose provision depends on the spatial pattern of land use. The pattern of land use is often determined by the decisions of multiple private landowners. Increasing the provision of ecosystem services, while beneficial for society as a whole, may be costly to private landowners....
We evaluate the return on investment (ROI) from public land conservation in the state of Minnesota, USA. We use a spatially-explicit modeling tool, the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to estimate how changes in land use and land cover (LULC), including public land acquisitions for conservation, influence...