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Forward-looking farmers owning multiple potential wetland restoration sites: implications for efficient restoration

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Abstract

Wetland restoration can increase the provision of multiple non-market ecosystem services. Environmental and socio-economic factors need to be accounted for when land is withdrawn from agriculture and wetlands are restored. We build multi-objective optimization models to provide decision support for wetland restoration in the Le Sueur river watershed in Southern Minnesota. We integrate environmental objectives of sediment reduction and habitat protection with socio-economic factors associated with the overlap of private land with potential wetland restoration sites in the watershed and the costs representing forward-looking farmers voluntarily taking land out of agricultural production in favor of wetland restoration. Our results demonstrate that the inclusion of these factors early on in the restoration planning process affects both the total costs of the restoration project and the spatial distribution of optimally selected wetland restoration sites.

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Acknowledgements

Our project was funded by the National Science Foundation (Award Number 1209402). We thank Nathaniel Mitchell from the University of Minnesota for the data and valuable advice during the course of our experiments and analysis. We also thank GIS officers Jonathan Graves, Sara Perrino, Stalberger Michael, Mark Manderfeld, Kimberly Middendorf, and Tim Fulton, for providing county level information on land ownership. We thank Nickolas Kullman for his help with Alpha-Delta algorithm. Finally, we thank our reviewers for providing valuable suggestions to help us improve the manuscript.

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  1. School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Svetlana Schroder (Kushch), Zhengxin Lang & Sergey Rabotyagov

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  1. Svetlana Schroder (Kushch)
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  2. Zhengxin Lang
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Correspondence to Svetlana Schroder (Kushch).

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Table 6 Sediment reduction coefficients by linear estimation(mg/yr/km2)
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Schroder (Kushch), S., Lang, Z. & Rabotyagov, S. Forward-looking farmers owning multiple potential wetland restoration sites: implications for efficient restoration. Environmental Management 61, 577–596 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-018-1002-0

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