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Title: Evaluating the Economic Costs and Benefits
of Slowing the Spread of the Emerald Ash Borer in Michigan
and Ohio
Principal Investigator: Jonathan Bossenbroek
Affiliation: University of Toledo, Toledo, OH
Award: $250,000
This project will investigate the ecological
and economic effects of the Emerald Ash Borer, a high-priority
pest for USDA agencies, on ash forestry and amenities
in Ohio and Michigan, and will examine the costs and
benefits of strategies to slow the spread of this
pest. Using a regional computable general equilibrium
model, the researchers will estimate the current distribution
and spread rate of Emerald Ash Borer, the economic
value of ash trees, and economic losses due to the
pest. They will use estimates of costs and effectiveness
of control methods to find a socially optimal control
strategy.
Title: Landscape-level Decision Support for
Invasive Species Management
Principal Investigator: Woodam Chung
Affiliation: University of Montana, Missoula, MT
Award: $209,000
This project will build a user-friendly decision support
system to help weed managers in the U.S. Forest Service
and other land management agencies to identify efficient
strategies for managing a wide variety of weed species.
The researchers will develop a heuristic solver for
complex temporal and spatial weed management problems,
which evaluates a large number of alternative strategies
to select the most efficient one. The system will
use information on the spatial distribution of weeds,
the dynamics of weed growth and spread, and the cost
effectiveness of control methods. It will be applied
in the Bitterroot and Nez Perce National Forests and
will incorporate Forest Service priorities and resource
constraints.
Title: Modeling and Economic Evaluation of Effectiveness
of Avian Influenza Mitigation Options
Principal Investigator: Levan Elbakidze
Affiliation: Texas A&M; University, College Station, TX
Award: $150,000
This study will examine the economic effectiveness of available mitigation
strategies against avian influenza, focusing on the Texas
poultry industry. The researchers will use an integrated
epidemiological-economic model and will consider characteristics
of the regional poultry industry to investigate the trade-offs
between preparedness, prevention, response, and recovery
activities, and provide guidance on the efficient allocation
of resources to those activities.
Title: A Decision Model for Controlling Buffelgrass
(Pennisetum ciliare) Invasion in an Urban-Wildland Interface
Combining Dynamic Programming with the Analytical Hierarchy
Process
Principal Investigator: George Frisvold
Affiliation: University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
Award: $119,000
This project will develop a web-based
decision support system that enables government agencies
and private land managers to provide pest information
and identify cost-effective strategies for managing
buffelgrass in Arizona, focusing on the desert-urban
interface. The system will solve a dynamic programming problem
with user inputs and provide user-friendly displays
that include maps of management strategies. Buffelgrass
is a nonnative perennial grass introduced for livestock
forage but has become invasive and contributes to fire hazards
in natural and urban-fringe areas.
Title: Welfare Impacts of Invasive Species on
Livestock Trade
Principal Investigator: Thomas Marsh
Affiliation: Washington State University, Pullman, WA
Award: $119,000
The researchers will examine the
economic and trade effects of animal disease outbreaks
in U.S. and global markets and of individual and multicountry
responses to those outbreaks. They will derive theoretically
consistent welfare measures for estimating the economic
effects and develop a dynamic bioeconomic model of
livestock and invasive species that includes the United
States, Canada, Mexico, and Australia. The study
will focus on hypothetical foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks
in North America and Australia.
Title: Bioeconomics of Managing Multi-Host Diseases
Principal Investigators: Richard Horan and Christopher
A. Wolf
Affiliation: Michigan State University, East Lansing,
MI
Award: $117,000
The researchers will investigate
the economic effects of policies to manage diseases
transmitted between livestock and wildlife. They will
incorporate producer incentives, recent ecological
developments on multi-host species-pathogen dynamics,
and pathogen co-evolutionary processes into a bioeconomic
framework. They will examine such diseases as bovine
tuberculosis, brucellosis, and Johne's disease.
Title: Spatial Decision-making Tools for Efficient
Allocation Strategies in Invasive Species Management
Principal Investigator: Frances R. Homans
Affiliation: University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN
Award: $106,000
This project will develop a spatially explicit decision-support
system that considers ecological and economic factors,
time, and uncertainty to efficiently allocate resources
to prevention, detection, and control for a variety
of invasive species. The system will be applied to
invasive species in Minnesota, to be identified during
the study, and the results will be compared to current
practices.
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