The USDA spends more than $5 billion annually on conservation programs to enhance environmental quality, ecosystem services and agricultural sustainability. Yet credible information on economic (and particularly non-market) benefits is often lacking, and current valuation techniques are challenged by the spatially heterogeneous ways that people understand, use, and value ecosystem services over different spatial scales. Marsh Institute Director Robert Johnston recently received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop advanced economic valuation tools designed to address these challenges. The project Next Generation Choice Experiment Architecture for Spatially-Explicit Agricultural Conservation and Ecosystem Service Valuation will develop new tools and demonstrate their use through a case study of conservation and aquatic ecosystem service improvements over the state of Virginia.

For full project descriptions, see the Marsh Institute Research Projects web page.