Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** the biden administration recently…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** the biden administration recently released a strategy for augmenting the national accounts used to calculate U.S. Gross domestic product with a new set of accounts that measure the abundance and economic value of natural capital. One of these will be a forest account. The best-available model for quantifying the accounting price of forest natural capital is inadequate for producing a national forest account for two reasons: 1) overly simplistic ecological assumptions; and 2) the lack of a management model for public forests. This project will develop a generalized forest natural capital accounting price (FNCAP) model that improves on current methodology in terms of behavioral scope, ecological and economic realism, and uncertainty quantification. We will first develop an improved private land FNCAP model that includes fire risk in the ecological and behavioral sub-models. Building on this, we will introduce the first public land FNCAP model capable of measuring social forest capital accounting prices. To do so, we will incorporate original estimates of the nonmarket value of forest-provide ecosystem services into the calculation. We will apply the FNCAP model to rich economic and ecological data from forest land in west coast states. Our analysis will also include the first rigorous uncertainty quantification analysis of FNCAP estimates. This research responds directly to priorities of the environmental and natural resource economics (A1651) program area. We will do so by developing improved methods for valuing forest natural capital and through a novel integration of nonmarket valuation results into natural capital accounting.