Digital Commons Network^™

With the potential expansion of forest conservation programs spurred by climate-change agreements, there is a need to measure the extent to which such programs achieve their intended results. Conventional methods for evaluating conservation impact tend to be biased because they do not compare like areas nor do they account for spatial relations. We assess the effect of a conservation initiative that combined designation of protected areas with payments for environmental services to conserve overwintering habitat for the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) in Mexico us a spatial-matching estimator which matches covariates among polygons and their neighbors, to. We measured avoided forest …