The USDA spends more than $5 billion per year on conservation to enhance environmental quality, ecosystem services and agricultural sustainability. The biophysical impacts of these programs (e.g., on soil retention and water quality) are relatively well understood and can be estimated using standard modeling approaches. Yet the economic benefits of these programs remain unknown, and credible information on non-market benefits is particularly lacking. Marsh Institute Director Robert Johnston received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the project “Integrating Locally-Weighted Meta-Regression and Machine Learning to Capture Spatial Complexity in Multi-Scale Benefit Transfers” that will develop standardized benefit transfer procedures to produce credible estimates of non-market conservation benefits.

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