About

Our faculty are engaged and dedicated educators, advisors, and mentors and have been honored with numerous university-wide and national teaching awards. Our classes emphasize the latest research coupled with cutting-edge technology and practices making our graduates among the most competitive candidates in the country for natural resource professions. Our curricula include everything from protected lands management and urban forestry, to industrial forestry operations and ecology. Small class sizes and faculty dedicated to teaching afford FREC students the chance to get to know their professors personally. Wide varieties of academic and professional opportunities are available through research, student organizations, and public outreach programs organized by the faculty.

Research topics

• Natural resource economics
• Economics
• Geography
• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Business
• Forestry
• Agricultural economics
• Agroforestry
• Microeconomics
• Biology

Selected publications

• Stochastic deforestation and ecosystem collapse

  Resource and Energy Economics · 2025-12-16

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Forest dynamics and ecosystem collapse in open-access problems

  Environment and Development Economics · 2025-08-29 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Changes like the shift of tropical forests into savannah in the Amazon highlight the potential for deforestation to drive ecosystems past potentially irreversible tipping points. Reforestation may avert or delay tipping points, but its success depends on the degree to which secondary and primary forests are substitutes in the production of ecosystem services. This article explores how deforestation, reforestation and substitutability between forest types affect the likelihood that a forest system will cross a tipping point. Efforts to ensure that secondary forests better mimic primary forests only yield a small improvement in terms of delaying ecosystem collapse. The most significant effects on tipping points arise from an increase in the relative costs of clearing primary forests or a decrease in the costs of protecting land tenure in secondary forests. Our results highlight the importance of the latter, which are often ignored as a policy target, to reduce the risk of ecosystem collapse.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Landowner Optimal Streamside Management Zone Width Decisions in Forest Harvesting

  Journal of Forest Economics · 2025-07-24

  article

  We examine a landowner’s problem of deciding on streamside management zone (SMZ) width under common regulatory constraints concerning water protection standards, assuming there is a prototypical landscape consisting of a productive planted forest and a stream buffer area of fixed starting width. We characterize an optimal width of these riparian buffer forests, and we determine how this decision depends on features such as expected erosion value, SMZ slope, and soil type. We also examine the intensity at which a landowner chooses to harvest within the SMZ, assuming they have the option to do so. The jointness of the decision on SMZ width and its harvesting intensity with other decisions such as rotation ages of the productive forest is analyzed theoretically and through a simulation for a prototypical pine forest in Virginia, United States. We show how several landscape and decision factors may influence SMZ decisions while still allowing the landowner to maximize land value. Given an acceptable rate of sediment delivery to the stream and tax incentives to set aside land as a buffer area, we find that (1) higher SMZ slopes, finer soil texture and higher harvest rates within the SMZ in general lead to a wider buffer area; (2) the impact of harvest intensity on sediment retention may change the optimal SMZ width, productive forest rotation age, and SMZ harvest intensity combination. We also find that not harvesting within the SMZ (even when allowed) might be optimal in the presence of a tax incentive depending on the effects of harvest intensity on soil retention and despite the value of timber in the buffer forest. Our model and results can be used to inform future policy aimed at reducing sediment runoff from harvesting operations into water bodies while simultaneously improving land value for the landowner and promoting sustainable water resource management.

  PublisherDOI

• Improving Environmental Outcomes Through Investments in Local Governance: Evidence from Brazil

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Social Cost of Fiscal Federalism and the Depletion of China’s Native Forests

  Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists · 2025-12-04

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Uncertainty Aversion and the Stochastic Forest Harvesting Problem

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Prices versus quantities in forest regulation

  Forest Policy and Economics · 2024-01-19 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Deferred rotation carbon programs for even-aged forests: Aligning landowner and societal objectives

  Forest Policy and Economics · 2024-08-01 · 6 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Incentives for Rural Households to Establish Tree Cover on Agricultural Land in Andhra Pradesh, India

  2022-10-25 · 1 citations

  book-chapter

  We explore the incentives of farmers to establish forest cover on agricultural land in Andhra Pradesh, India. A large body of theoretical economic work on land-use decisions examines the opportunity costs of switching land uses from agriculture to forest production (Parks and Hardie 1995; Haim 2011; Amacher et al. 2009), but empirical work that estimates the drivers of margin changes for these problems is still needed (Park et al. 1998). Based on a large dataset collected using a randomized survey of farm households in the East and West Godhavari regions in Andhra Pradesh, we use a multilevel mixed-effects probit model to analyze the decision to plant trees on private lands. We find that the most important positive drivers in the decision to plant trees are total land area, years of land tenure, and off-farm labour opportunity. However, factors that lower tree planting incentives are irrigation availability, average travel time to managed plots, elevation, and belonging to the scheduled tribes’ social group. Moreover, we find evidence that the probability of tree planting is not only associated with important fixed effects (the same across all households in our sample), but it is also associated with random effects that vary from village to village and with the number of plots that the household manages.

  PublisherDOI

• Prices Versus Quantities in Forest Regulation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Natural resource economics
  • Environmental science
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Erkki Koskela

  37 shared

• Markku Ollikainen

  University of Helsinki

  28 shared

• Frank Merry

  19 shared

• Jay Sullivan

  Virginia Tech

  17 shared

• William F. Hyde

  Universidad de la República

  15 shared

• Richard J. Brazee

  14 shared

• Kelly M. Cobourn

  Virginia Tech

  10 shared

• Jintao Xu

  Ningbo University of Technology

  8 shared

Awards & honors

• Senior Editor, Natural Resource Modeling (2004-2007)
• Assoc. Ed, Forest Science (2007-2010)
• Editor, Forest Science (2001-2004)
• Associate Editor, Journal of Forest Economics (1999- )
• Editorial Council, Journal of Environmental Economics and Ma…