Prioritizing Ecosystem Service Protection and Conservation Efforts in the Forest Plantations of the Red Hills

We use a stated choice experiment to estimate household willingness-to-pay for a program providing incentives to private forest land owners in the Red Hills region of southwest Georgia and northwest Florida. The estimated values of various program attributes inform a landscape analysis that identifies high-priority private forest land that could be targeted for conservation incentives. Households report an increase in utility from the program when it explicitly identifies a target ecosystem-service priority. Also, inclusion of stated preference values in the prioritization plan highlights a potential scarcity effect that has important implications for conservation targeting.