Nan Zhang (3rd Year ENV PhD) - Nicholas School of Environment
Economic and ecological trade-offs under forest conservation management: A Markov model analysis
Date: 10/17/2025 (Fri)
Time: 2:00pm- 3:00pm
Location: This seminar will be held both on-site and remotely. The on-site location will be: Grainger Hall 2102 . It will also be held remotely via Zoom. (Please sign in to see the link.)
Organizer: Alejandro and Xingchen
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
2:00pm - Seminar Presentation (2:00pm to 3:00pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: Conservation on private forestlands often involves constraining land-use activities to ensure the long-term sustainability of forest resources. Evaluating the economic and ecological outcomes of land management restrictions is essential to achieving a balance between environmental protection and forest production. This study applies a Markovian forest growth model to simulate the dynamics of naturally regenerated mixed loblolly pine-hardwood forests under management regimes with different harvesting restrictions. The regimes include an active one with frequent, aggressive harvests and a conservative one that restricts harvesting to prioritize ecological preservation. The analysis evaluates trade-offs between reduced timber revenues and enhanced ecological benefits from carbon sequestration and tree biodiversity. Results show that adopting a conservative management regime increases species diversity by 3.9% and size diversity by 21.4%. This leads to a carbon benefit of $463 per acre but comes with a $373 per acre reduction in timber revenue, yielding a benefit-cost ratio of 1.24. When the stand biodiversity uplift valued at $513 per acre is further incorporated, the benefit-cost ratio improves to 2.61. However, site-level variations reveal that high productivity does not guarantee superior economic efficiency. These findings can provide policy implications for promoting forest conservation management practices that achieve both environmental sustainability and economic viability. Stage: Manuscript submitted Type of feedback: Any comments are welcome