An Analysis of Persistence, Resilience, and the Conservation of Keystone Species

Economists and ecologists now agree that economic and ecological systems are connected and that these systems ought to be viewed as a single system. Nevertheless, since this recognition has been recent, there are very few theoretical analyses of jointly determined ecological-economic systems. As such, this paper has two aims. First, the ecological notions of persistence and resilience are described in the context of a stylized ecological-economic system. Second, these notions are utilized to analyze a conservation problem with two distinct attributes. Specifically, in this problem, the objects of interest are keystone species, and society obtains benefits from the economic and the ecological aspects of conservation