Economic unit values of soundscape/acoustic effects have been based on changes in the number of annoyed persons or on decibel changes. The normal procedure has been the application of these unit values to noise-attenuation measures affecting the noisier façade of a dwelling. Novel modular vegetation-based soundscape measures, so-called green walls, might be relevant for both noisy and qui...

Street trees and urban woodlands provide a number of environmental and social benefits, including contributing to climate change adaptation and mitigation and providing urban green space. This Note presents the results of a review of three approaches to estimating the amenity value of street trees: CAVAT, Helliwell and i-Tree. The review showed that the three valuation systems differ significan...

This paper examines landscape preferences of residents in amenity-rich bushfire-prone landscapes in New South Wales, Australia. Insights are provided into vegetation preferences in areas where properties neighbor large areas of native vegetation, such as national parks, or exist within a matrix of cleared and vegetated private and public land. In such areas, managing fuel loads in the proximity...

Projected increasing demands for timber coupled with reduced harvests on public lands have led to concern among some forest policymakers regarding the adequacy of future U.S. timber supplies. One question concerns the likelihood that prevailing market incentives will induce industrial and nonindustrial private landowners to intensify forest management. We develop empirical models of historical ...

Two schools of thought exist regarding the planting of bare-root seedlings. One school favors the “pull-up” method where the seedling is pulled-up 3 to 10 cm after placing the roots in the planting hole. Although this action purportedly straightens the taproot, data are lacking to show this extra step actually improves field performance. Pulling the seedling up usually results in the root-colla...

This study applies a hedonic model to assess the economic benefits of air quality improvement following the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment at the county level in the lower 48 United States. An instrumental variable approach that combines geographically weighted regression and spatial autoregression methods (GWR-SEM) is adopted to simultaneously account for spatial heterogeneity and spatial autoco...

This study used panel data models with spatial error correlation to analyze private tree planting in the US South from 1955 to 2003. Controlling for statewide, fixed effects allows us to disentangle the effect of spatial interaction from that of state heterogeneity and omitted variables. The results show that there is significant spatial interdependence among the southern states in private tree...

1. There is growing interest in improving the biodiversity of urban and suburban areas. Here we report on the effectiveness of a very simple intervention that may be used to boost flower and pollinator abundance; the sowing of plots of wildflowers in amenity grasslands. The abundance of flowers, bumblebees (Bombus spp.), and hoverflies (Syrphidae) was surveyed in 30 such plots, either 1 or 2 ye...