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

• Environmental science
• Computer Science
• Natural resource economics
• Economics
• Geography
• Artificial Intelligence
• Ecology
• Business
• Environmental economics
• Geology
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental planning
• Oceanography
• Agroforestry
• Agricultural economics
• Forestry
• Data science
• Management science
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Forest dynamics and ecosystem collapse in open-access problems

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

  articleOpen access1st author

  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

• <p><b>A Tale of Water and </b><b>Fish: Untangling the Capitalization Value of Bundled Ecosystem Services in Freshwater Lakes</b><b></b></p>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Review Paper — Assessing the Economic Implications of Land Subsidence

  Water Economics and Policy · 2025-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Land subsidence, the sinking of the Earth’s surface due to the movement of subsurface earth materials, affects nearly one-fifth of the global population and generates consequential and widespread damages to natural and human systems. Yet, the phenomenon has received little attention to date in the economic literature. Some effort has been undertaken to estimate the direct damages to buildings and infrastructure and the indirect damages that arise as flood risk increases, especially in coastal, urban areas that are vulnerable to the effects of sea-level rise. In addition, several studies have integrated hydrologic and economic models to identify efficient policies to regulate groundwater pumping, the leading driver of land subsidence. There are compelling opportunities for economists to extend the knowledge frontier on this topic, for example by estimating environmental damages, building integrated assessment models to evaluate policy options, and exploring parallels with the climate change literature.

  PublisherDOI

• Enabling agriculture’s transformative capacity to respond to climate change in the long run

  OECD food, agriculture and fisheries working papers · 2025-01-14 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Agriculture is increasingly exposed to climate risks that challenge the sustainability of existing production systems in many regions of the world. Developing new transformative adaptation capabilities of agricultural production systems is essential. Yet, there is uncertainty as to what constitutes transformation, as well as to the role of government in fostering systemic change. This report addresses these challenges via a systematic literature review exploring examples of agricultural transformation in response to climate change. This paper frames transformative adaptation as a function of the depth (extent of change from the “current system”), breadth (scale of adoption), and speed (pace of implementation) of change. The findings highlight lessons from past efforts, identify barriers to transformative adaptation, examine how public policy can effectively address these challenges, and offer valuable insights to improving the climate-resiliency of agricultural systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Stochastic deforestation and ecosystem collapse

  Resource and Energy Economics · 2025-12-16

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Lignes directrices pour l’élaboration d’un indicateur de biodiversité des habitats agricoles propre à l’OCDE

  2023-09-01

  report

  La moitié des terres habitables de la planète étant utilisée pour l’agriculture, la surveillance de la biodiversité des terres agricoles est essentielle pour atteindre les objectifs de la Convention des Nations Unies sur la diversité biologique (CDB). Ce document vise à faire progresser la surveillance de la biodiversité agricole dans les pays de l’OCDE en étudiant les initiatives nationales actuelles et en proposant des lignes directrices pour l’élaboration d’un indicateur fondé sur l’habitat. L’approche proposée fournit un cadre flexible et pragmatique pour harmoniser les rapports des programmes nationaux tout en tenant compte de la diversité des facteurs contextuels d’un pays à l’autre, notamment les systèmes agricoles, le climat, les conditions biophysiques et les pools d’espèces. Afin de faciliter la mise en œuvre de l’indicateur à court terme, il est prévu trois niveaux de notification, qui dépendent de la disponibilité des données, de sorte que tous les pays peuvent participer, qu'ils disposent de ressources limitées en matière de données ou qu'ils soient déjà dotés de programmes de surveillance.

  PublisherDOI

• Climate change adaptation policies to foster resilience in agriculture

  OECD food, agriculture and fisheries working papers · 2023-07-11 · 13 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  National climate change adaptation programmes can strengthen agriculture’s resilience to adverse climatic events by investing in absorptive capacity to mitigate the impact of a shock in the short run, adaptive capacity to effect incremental changes in the medium run, and transformative capacity to create fundamentally new agricultural production systems in the long run. Using UNFCCC reporting documents, this analysis takes stock of agricultural climate change adaptation programmes in OECD countries and evaluates their contribution to developing resilience. Significant investments have been undertaken in the creation of decision support tools, the management of soil and water resources, and cultivar selection and breeding to address key agricultural vulnerabilities, namely drought, flooding and declining crop yields. Adaptation programmes developed to date most heavily emphasise adaptive capacity to address sustained and growing climate risks. Actions that contribute to transformative capacity are beginning to emerge, but lag behind medium-run measures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Guidelines for the development of an OECD farmland habitat biodiversity indicator

  OECD food, agriculture and fisheries working papers · 2023-07-11 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  With half of the world’s habitable land being used for agriculture, monitoring the biodiversity on agricultural land is essential for meeting the objectives of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This paper seeks to advance the monitoring of farmland biodiversity in OECD countries by investigating current national initiatives and proposing guidelines for the development of an indicator based on habitat. The proposed approach provides a flexible and pragmatic framework to harmonise reporting from national programmes while accommodating cross-country diversity in contextual factors, including farming systems, climate, biophysical conditions and species pools. To facilitate implementation in the near term, the indicator includes a three-tiered approach to reporting based on data availability, which accommodates countries with limited data resources as well as those that currently have monitoring programmes in place.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Quantifying co‐benefits of water quality policies: An integrated assessment model of land and nitrogen management

  American Journal of Agricultural Economics · 2023-08-08 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Due to the nature of nitrogen cycling, policies designed to address water quality concerns have the potential to provide benefits beyond the targeted water quality improvements. For example, actions to protect water quality by reducing nitrate leaching from agriculture also reduce emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. These positive effects, which are incidental to the regulation's intended target, are termed “co‐benefits.” To quantify the co‐benefits associated with reduced nitrate leaching, we integrate an economic model of farmer decision making with a model of terrestrial nitrogen cycling for the watershed surrounding Lake Mendota, Wisconsin, USA. Our modeling approach provides a framework that links air and water pollutants in an agri‐environmental system and offers a direction for future studies. Our model results highlight the finding that the co‐benefits from nitrous oxide abatement are substantial, and their inclusion increases the benefit–cost ratio of water quality policies. Consideration of these co‐benefits has the potential to reverse the conclusions of benefit–cost analysis in the assessment of current water quality policies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A hydro-economic analysis of end-of-century climate projections on agricultural land and water use, production, and revenues in the U.S. Northern Rockies and Great Plains

  Journal of Hydrology Regional Studies · 2022-06-08 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Study region,Montana, U.S.A. Study focus Creating adaptation plans for projected imbalances in the western U.S. agricultural water demand-supply system are difficult given uncertainty in climate projections. It is critical to understand the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of the regional agricultural system and hydrologic impacts of climate change adaptation. We applied a stochastic, integrated hydro-economic model that simulates land and water allocations to analyse Montana farmer adaptations to a range of projected climate conditions and the response of the hydrologic system to those adaptations. Satellite observations of crop types, productivity, water use, and land allocation were used for model calibration. A suite of climate models was employed to quantify end-of-century impacts on streamflows, water and land use, production, and net revenues.New hydrological insights for the region Simulations showed summer streamflows were influenced by a state-wide 18.2% increase in agricultural water use. Decreased summer water availability with increased demand could have far reaching impacts downstream. Land use for irrigated crops increased 1.6%, while rainfed crops decreased 6.5%, implying state-level decrease in planted area. Even with increased land and water use for irrigated crops, production decreased 0.5%, while rainfed production decreased 2.7%. Corresponding losses in net revenues totaled 1.5% and 7.2% for irrigated and rainfed crops, respectively.Results highlight vulnerabilities of semi-arid agricultural regions and can aid water managers in sustaining agriculture in these regions.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CNH-L: Linking Land-Use Decision Making, Water Quality, and Lake Associations to Understand Human-Natural Feedbacks in Lake Catchments

  NSF · $1.8M · 2016–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Armen R. Kemanian

  Pennsylvania State University

  11 shared

• Levan Elbakidze

  West Virginia University

  11 shared

• Weizhe Weng

  10 shared

• Gregory S. Amacher

  10 shared

• Xinde Ji

  Peking University

  10 shared

• Cayelan C. Carey

  Virginia Tech

  9 shared

• Kevin Boyle

  Northwestern University

  8 shared

• Kathleen C. Weathers

  Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

  8 shared