CNH-Ex: The Influence of the Size of Protected Areas on Their Ecological and Economic Effectiveness

国家公园、州立公园和自然保护区等保护区在生物保护中起着至关重要的作用。它们还强烈地影响人类社会，因为它们带来经济成本，并通过娱乐和提供自然资源而带来社会利益。虽然许多研究都集中在如何设计保护区以最好地保护物种和自然栖息地，但很少有研究为如何设计保护区提供指导，以最大限度地减少成本，最大限度地提高当地居民或更广泛的社会效益。该项目将研究保护区设计如何影响保护区内的自然系统和保护区外的人类系统，以及这些影响如何相互作用，以确定保护区对保护和社会的净效益。研究的重点是储备设计中最基本和最可变的方面之一——储备规模；以及阿巴拉契亚山脉中部和南部的落叶森林保护区，这是一个生物多样性高、人类使用广泛的地区。在社会方面，该项目将结合土地征用的计量经济学分析，以及对特定土地交易的保护目标和为实现这些目标而实施的管理计划的分析。在生物方面，研究人员将把地理信息系统对保护区内部和周围土地覆盖变化的分析与生态实地调查结合起来。总体而言，该项目将研究保护区生态目标改善的成本如何与保护区的规模相适应。该项目旨在帮助决策者和土地管理者提高保护区的经济效率和生态效益。这项研究将与美国最大的非政府土地信托机构自然保护协会（The Natural Conservancy）密切合作进行。与该协会和其他管理组织的伙伴关系将有助于广泛传播研究结果，该项目将为合作伙伴提供包括地理数据库和捐赠计算器在内的管理工具。该项目还将通过培养一名博士后研究员、两名博士生和本科生，以及在年轻科学家的职业生涯早期建立一种新的跨学科合作，来增强科研队伍。

Protected areas such as national and state parks and nature reserves play a vital role in biological conservation. They also strongly affect human societies because they entail economic costs and confer social benefits through recreation and provision of natural resources. While numerous studies have focused on how to design reserves to best conserve species and natural habitats, little research has been done to offer guidance on how to design reserves to best minimize costs and maximize benefits to local residents or to society more broadly. This project will investigate how reserve design can affect both the natural system within a reserve and the human system outside it, and how these effects can interact to determine the net benefits of reserves to conservation and society. The research focuses on one of the most basic and variable aspects of reserve design, reserve size; and on protected areas in the deciduous forests of the central and southern Appalachians, an area of high biological diversity and extensive human use. On the social side, the project will combine econometric analyses of land acquisitions with analyses of the conservation goals of particular land deals and the management plans put in place to achieve them. On the biological side, researchers will combine GIS analysis of land cover changes within and around protected areas with ecological field surveys. Overall, the project will examine how the costs of delivering improvements in the ecological objectives of protected areas respond to their size. This project is specifically intended to help policy makers and land managers increase the economic efficiency and ecological effectiveness of protected areas. The research will be done in close collaboration with The Natural Conservancy, the largest non-governmental land trust in the U.S. Partnership with this and other managerial organizations will serve to disseminate results widely, and the project will provide partners with management tools including geodatabases and endowment calculators. The project will also enhance the scientific workforce by training a postdoctoral researcher, two Ph.D. students, and undergraduate students, and by establishing a new, interdisciplinary collaboration between young scientist early in their careers.