ABSTRACT
At least 38 states in the United States have statewide land conservation programs which focus on saving valuable ecological lands. These programs collect data on a plethora of land characteristics to rank parcels’ ecological importance but seldom include acquisition costs in determining which parcels should be selected. This study focuses on improving targeting strategies by incorporating acquisition costs along with ecological benefits in land parcel rankings. This can be a challenging task. The market value of rural and ecologically important land can be difficult to obtain since these lands are not sold frequently. And because of use-value or preferential property tax schemes, assessed values often do not reflect market values. Therefore we recommend programs estimate hedonic models on recent land sales using the land and neighborhood characteristics they have already collected and then use the estimated model parameters to predict market land values for other parcels. To illustrate this approach, we estimate hedonic models to predict the market values of land parcels larger than 10 acres in three Maryland counties. We then use these estimated market land values in three targeting schemes, along with the parcels’ ecological scores, to rank parcels. Our results suggest the current land targeting scheme in Maryland’s GreenPrint Program can be improved by incorporating parcel acquisition costs in the ranking schemes.
