Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Converting Croplands To Grassland: A Spatial Analysis Of The Economic Feasibility Of Soil Greenhouse Gas Mitigation In Midwest, United States, Paco C. Defrancis

Journal of Environmental and Resource Economics at Colby

The global agriculture sector is responsible for close 20% of the aggregate anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions emitted since the start of the industrial age. Much of these emissions are attributed to the degradation of soils due to land use change when native ecosystems were converted to agricultural fields. Soil organic carbon (SOC) has been found to decrease in temperate soils when the native (such as a forest or grassland) ecosystem is replace by croplands. The aggregate amount of organic carbon stored in soils globally is estimated be 3.3x the size of the atmospheric carbon pool. Further soil degradation and …

The Value Of Dune Width In Avalon, New Jersey: A Hedonic Pricing Analysis, Matt Mignon

Journal of Environmental and Resource Economics at Colby

Previous research on the economics of coastal housing markets has proven that housing values along the east coast of the United States capitalize on the attributes of local beaches. These recent studies document two important findings: that beach width positively affects coastal property values and that there is a proximity effect, in which distance from the beach plays a significant role in the capitalization of local beach attributes. This paper builds upon these findings to explore the influence that dune width has on coastal property values in Avalon, New Jersey. I hypothesize that as dune width increases, local property values …

Predicting Changes Of Rainfall Erosivity And Hillslope Erosion Risk Across Greater Sydney Region, Australia, Xihua Yang, Bofu Yu, Xiaojin Xie

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Rainfall changes have significant effect on rainfall erosivity and hillslope erosion, but the magnitude of the impact is not well quantified because of the lack of high resolution rainfall data. Recently, the 2-km rainfall projections from regional climate models have become available for the Greater Sydney Region (GSR) at daily time step for the current (1990-2009) and future (2040-2059) periods. These climate projections allow predicting of rainfall erosivity changes and the associated hillslope erosion risk for climate change assessment and mitigation.

In this study, we developed a daily rainfall erosivity model for GSR to predict rainfall erosivity from the current …

A High-Altitude Balloon Platform For Determining Regional Uptake Of Carbon Dioxide Over Agricultural Landscapes, Angela M. Bouche

DePaul Discoveries

Interactions between the biosphere and atmosphere are an important part of the global carbon cycle, and quantifying the carbon dioxide exchanges between them is helpful in predicting the uptake of carbon dioxide from anthropogenic sources by the biosphere in the future. In the Midwestern United States, agricultural systems cover a large part of the landscape, so understanding their role in influencing the global carbon budget is crucial as anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide grow larger. Carbon dioxide exchanges can be measured by eddy covariance at the ecosystem level (bottom-up approach) or regionally by inversion techniques (top-down approach). Here we describe …