Reserve Selection in the presence of Economic Feedback Effects

Targeting land for conservation has always been an important question. Studies so far have mostly assumed that biological and economic worlds operate in isolation from each other. This paper initiates the economic feedback effects into the reserve selection mechanism. With the help of heuristics, this paper shows that ignoring economic feedback effects can lead to sub-optimal conservation outcome and biased conservation estimates when we consider the biological value of land outside of nature reserves. The informed heuristic includes the amenity value effect in conservation planning process where as the informed-spatial heuristic adds spatial externalities to the model