Tyler Treakle

The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) provides regulatory protections for imperiled species habitat that are considered to be some of the strongest in the world. Critics of the ESA claim that these regulations are costly to local economies, often pointing to highly publicized job losses among a few controversial species listing contexts. Our study is the first to empirically assess the external validity of these claims by using quasi-experimental methods to estimate labor market impacts for a much larger set of species than has been analyzed to date. We do so for 128 terrestrial species that have been affected by the full regulatory extent of the ESA -- both listing and critical habitat designations -- over a 32 year period that the ESA has been active. We find no evidence that ESA regulations have impacted total employment growth in regulated areas. Further, we use LLMs to link species-specific threat information to the economic sectors most likely to be regulated in each regulatory context, and estimate a distribution of species-sector impacts tied to the mechanisms of the ESA. We find no impact of ESA regulations on labor markets for the majority of these cases, with large proportional impacts in only three species-sector cases. We highlight that the labor market costs of the ESA are low on average but concentrated in particular contexts in particular economic sectors, providing a more holistic perspective of how the ESA has impacted local economic activity to date.

Policies to allocate common-pool renewable resources can include provisions that allow managers to adjust to temporary reductions in the underlying abundance of the resource. One such provision is to issue property rights that are differentiated in the likelihood that the rights holder will be able to exercise the activity defined in the property right during times of resource shortage, making some rights more reliable than others. In this paper, we examine if the value of reliability is reflected in prices paid for transfers of property rights for natural resources, drawing on data from water market transactions in Chile. We find that these transactions exhibit relationships between reliability and prices paid that are consistent with economic intuition: more reliable water rights are associated with higher prices per unit of water.

Advances in remote sensing of land use and GPS animal movement data offer a pathway to improving conservation outcomes through increased accuracy and spatial resolution of data used by conservation planners, but to date, these data have not been widely incorporated into terrestrial migratory species corridor design. We illustrate the potential conservation gains, measured in terms of increased site utilization, of incorporating satellite data into an integer-programming model to design migratory corridors for four elk herds in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. We compare expected site utilization outcomes for corridors planned using the new satellite data to expected utilization outcomes using traditional coarse habitat range maps and agricultural land cost data. For low budgets typical in conservation planning, increases in expected corridor site utilization from using satellite versus traditional data -- i.e., the value of satellite data -- range from 47-538% across herds, with heterogeneity in whether improved cost or benefit data was the main driver of the gains. Overall, our results suggest investment in development and use of satellite data products could substantially improve conservation outcomes for a given budget.

Pesticides are an important input to production for agricultural producers but pose external costs to society in the form of health impacts. In this study, I quantify the costs and benefits of command-and-control regulations for a particularly neurotoxic insecticide called aldicarb. I do so by leveraging a sharp change in the ecological system, the introduction of the invasive citrus greening disease in Florida citrus groves in the mid-2000s, which was followed by a near tripling in the quantity of aldicarb applied by local farmers until it's ensuing phaseout and ban in the United States in 2010. I use this sudden rise and fall in the application of aldicarb as identifying variation to estimate an 8-15% increase in internal infant mortality relative to the years before and after the spike in the use of the pesticide. Further, I show preliminary evidence that citrus production drops (6 tons/acre) in the years after the pesticide ban, illustrating the tradeoff that the ban poses between agricultural productivity and human health.

Water allocation decisions affect many aquatic ecosystems and often involve tradeoffs with other human uses of water. These tradeoffs lead to conflicts between different types of water users. Impending climate pressure is expected to decrease water availability and increase variability in water supply in many of these systems, increasing conflict related to allocation decisions. In this paper we develop a process-based modeling framework that combines microeconomic models and parsimonious models of natural systems to examine the societal benefits of water allocated to each of two different types of users. The framework is based on a conceptualization of a social planner who allocates water to a fishery spawning ground and regional agricultural producers in a coordinated manner. We focus on systems with hydrologic and ecological linkages. We use numerical methods to show that model parameters and functional forms for the hydrologic and ecological linkages influence the optimal coordinated management of water use by the linked users.

Preemptive conservation efforts to reduce threats have been credited with precluding the need to list some imperiled species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). Such efforts can result in outcomes where species are conserved and regulatory costs associated with ESA listing are avoided. Yet, the extent and type of conservation effort involved in achieving preclusion from listing are not well understood. We quantified the attributes of conservation efforts identified as important for 43 species whose preclusion from listing was attributed to conservation efforts, as described in U.S. Federal Register documents that report the decisions not to list. We considered 2 features of preemptive conservation: effort applied (measured as the number of conservation initiatives) and number of conservation partners involved. We also quantified the type and location of conservation actions. We found a mean of 4.3 initiatives (range 1–22) and 8.2 partners (range 1–31) documented per precluded species; both measures of conservation effort were significantly and positively associated with the species' range area and the proportion of private land across its range. The number of initiatives was also positively related to the number of threats affecting a species. Locations of conservation actions varied; more species had actions on public land than on private land (p = 0.003). Numbers of species with restorative actions (e.g., invasive species control) were similar to numbers with prohibitive actions. Our findings highlight relationships between species' context and preemptive conservation activities, providing a first cross-species analysis of conservation efforts for species that were precluded from listing under the ESA due to conservation.

In recent decades, there has been an increasing emphasis on proactive efforts to conserve species being considered for listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) before they are listed (i.e., preemptive conservation). These efforts, which depend on voluntary actions by public and private land managers across the species' range, aim to conserve species while avoiding regulatory costs associated with ESA listing. We collected data for a set of social, economic, environmental, and institutional factors that we hypothesized would influence voluntary decisions to promote or inhibit preemptive conservation of species under consideration for ESA listing. We used logistic regression to estimate the association of these factors with preemptive conservation outcomes based on data for a set of species that entered the ESA listing process and were either officially listed (n = 314) or preemptively conserved (n = 73) from 1996 to 2018. Factors significantly associated with precluded listing due to preemptive conservation included high baseline conservation status, low proportion of private land across the species' range, small total range size, exposure to specific types of threats, and species' range extending over several states. These results highlight strategies that can help improve conservation outcomes, such as allocating resources for imperiled species earlier in the listing process, addressing specific threats, and expanding incentives and coordination mechanisms for conservation on private lands.

Income diversification is an important aspect of financial security among individual fishers, who generally face high annual fluctuations in their income levels. While prior studies have analyzed the importance of diversifying within-fisheries income streams (e.g., across species groups, or region), the role of income from non-fishing occupations as an additional source of diversification has received little empirical attention. We link fisheries landing data to survey responses among 1,230 individual fishers living in the Continental US West Coast to analyze trends and correlates of individual fishers choosing to earn non-fishing income. We find that predictors capturing the opportunity cost of not fishing, pecuniary factors, and within-fishery diversity metrics significantly influence the probability that fishers earn non-fishing income. Our results indicate an overall tradeoff between within-fishery with non-fishery income diversification choices; but that this tradeoff may be weaker for particular non-fishing occupation types and at particular times of the year.