Robert J. Johnston Archives

Coastal SEES Collaborative Research: A Cross-site Comparison of Salt Marsh Persistence in Response to Sea-level Rise and Feedbacks from Social Adaptations

Nearly half of the world’s population lives within 100 km of the coast, the area ranked as the most vulnerable to climate-driven sea-level rise (SLR). Projected rates of accelerated SLR are expected to cause massive changes that would transform both the ecological and social dynamics of low-lying coastal areas. It is thus essential to improve…
Coastal Hazards and Northeast Housing Values: Comparative Implications for Climate Change Adaptation and Community Resilience

Chief among the information needed to enhance coastal hazard adaptation are assessments of economic outcomes and policy implications. This project will combine coastal hazards, property value and other data with economic models to answer three questions central to Northeast coastal adaptation: (1) How do property values and tax bases in Northeast communities respond to coastal…
The Economics of Marine Plastic Pollution: What are the Benefits of International Cooperation?

Plastic pollution is a global phenomenon with significant impacts on the marine and coastal environment. Since plastic is resistant to degradation, it is expected to persist in the environment in some form over geological timescales, meaning that damages accrue over very long periods of time. However, the physical form of marine plastic changes over time,…
Estimation of Spatially Explicit Water Quality Benefits throughout River Systems: Development of Next Generation Stated Preference Methods

Stated Preference (SP) methods are survey-based methods to calculate the economic value of environmental improvements, and provide the only means to measure total use and nonuse willingness to pay (WTP) for water quality change. Yet water quality has multiple characteristics that pose challenges for WTP estimation: water quality can vary spatially and temporally, the role…
Exploring the Trends, the Science, and the Options of Buffer Management in the Great Bay Watershed

The US EPA recently designated New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary (GBE) as an impaired waterbody, which exhibits classic symptoms of nitrogen pollution. Sixty-eight percent of this nitrogen load originates from nonpoint sources including stormwater runoff, fertilizers, and septic systemsâ€”all of which could be mitigated through the coordinated use of buffer zones in the GBE region.…
Linking Coastal Adaption Portfolios to Salt Marsh Resilience and Ecosystem Service Values

This project is an international and interdisciplinary collaboration led by Marsh Institute researchers, with collaborators at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Tidal marshes are one of the most common natural features used for coastal adaptation (protecting the coast from flooding and storms), and are frequently promoted for their…
Multi-scale Coupled Natural Human System Dynamics of Nitrogen in Residential Landscapes

This $1.6 million project is a multi-year, interdisciplinary partnership between institutions including the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University, the City University of New York (CUNY), Cornell University, the U.S. Forest Service Northern Research Station, the University of North Carolina, Florida Atlantic University, the University of Rhode Island, and others. Urban, suburban and exurban…
Targeted Conservation Contracts To Enhance Agricultural Best Management Practices: Incorporating Heterogeneity and Predicting Additionality

This project is a coordinated effort involving researchers from Clark University and the University of Delaware, and funded by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant no. 2016-67023-21757 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The U.S. spends billions on state and federal policies encouraging farmers to implement best management practices (BMPs) through…
Benefits and Costs of Non-market Value Methods for Environmental Management

Environmental programs and policies cost billions of dollars per year and environmental policy makers and managers can be assisted in their decisions on the allocation of public resources to environmental investments by information on the community’s preferences for environmental outcomes and actions. Ideally, this information will be expressed as monetary values (i.e. nonmarket values expressed…
Spatially Explicit Ecosystem Service Benefit Transfer for Policy Evaluation: An Integrated Biophysical and Meta-Analytic Approach

The USDA spends over $5 billion annually on conservation programs to enhance ecosystem services that promote agricultural sustainability, often targeting benefits such as water quality and aquatic ecosystem services. While the biophysical impacts of these programs can be estimated using established models, the economic benefits are generally unknown. Addressing this shortcoming requires practical, reliable and…

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