NSF Award Abstract - #0241509| NSF Award Abstract - #0241509 |
AWSFL008-DS3 |
| NSF Org | SES |
| Latest Amendment Date | May 19, 2004 |
| Award Number | 0241509 |
| Award Instrument | Continuing grant |
| Program Manager |
Daniel H. Newlon SES DIVN OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SCIENCES SBE DIRECT FOR SOCIAL, BEHAV & ECONOMIC SCIE |
| Start Date | July 1, 2003 |
| Expires | June 30, 2006 (Estimated) |
| Expected Total Amount | $219370 (Estimated) |
| Investigator |
John Rust jrust@gemini.econ.umd.edu (Principal Investigator current) Harry J. Paarsch (Co-Principal Investigator current) |
| Sponsor |
NBER 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 021385317 617/868-3900 |
| NSF Program | 1320 ECONOMICS |
| Field Application | |
| Program Reference Code | 0000,OTHR, |
In environmental and natural resource economics, the management of renewable natural resources is of considerable interest to economists because the prospect of stewarding a resource forever has practical importance and real-world relevance. Moreover, because past failures in managing certain renewable natural resources properly have lead to the extinction of several species, developing practical strategies for managing remaining renewable natural resources is both timely and useful. This project investigates in detail the management of one renewable natural resource, timber, in the province of British Columbia, Canada. For a Timber Supply Area (TSA) in British Columbia the investigators have obtained unique access to extremely detailed site-level data, which are used by timber-supply managers in the British Columbia Ministry of Forests when making harvesting decisions. In particular, they have access to elaborate linked biological and geographical data in the form of a Geographical Information System (GIS) at the grid level which, in this case, is a hectare or 100 meters square. Thus, for every hectare in the Fraser TSA, which is located near Vancouver, British Columbia and contains several hundreds of thousands hectares, officials at the Ministry of Forests provide the investigators with a wide variety of biological, engineering, and geographical information relevant to harvesting timber. In addition, they also have access to the harvesting strategies proposed and, in some cases, the decisions implemented by the Minister of Forests, so they can compare our estimated decisions with actual ones.In developing practical harvesting solutions for timber, they apply the method of stochastic dynamic programming. The goal of the project is to make the following contributions: First, this project takes geography seriously, both in the planar sense and in the three-dimensional sense. Second, it takes site-specific heterogeneity seriously both on the cost side in terms of felling and transportation and on the growth and yield side in terms of heterogeneous stands of timber. Third, it models initial conditions. In particular, it does not take as the starting point a steady-state allocation, or even an optimal allocation. Instead, it takes the existing uneven-aged timber stand as given and derives the optimal policy function, the optimal timber-harvesting profile, in terms of this age distribution. Fourth, this project uses best-practice biological methods to model the dynamics of uneven-aged forest growth and yield. Fifth, in the past economists and foresters have typically demonstrated their methods by making extremely simple assumptions concerning the stochastic nature of timber prices and volumes so that closed-form examples could be solved. This research implements recent developments in computational methods so that practitioners can solve numerically for the optimal policy function in realistic biological, economic, and spatial environments.
