Agriculture is the defining feature of many rural North American landscapes. Over time, a focus on productivity and large-scale cultivation of commodity crops has resulted in agricultural landscapes dominated by large, homogenous fields, such as the corn and soy that blanket the Midwest. But agricultural landscapes provide more than just the crops grown on them. They also offer animal and plant habitat, clean our water and air, and capture carbon in the soil—a host of services often termed ecosystem services. Many key co-benefits are thanks to insects and other arthropods: they pollinate
Understanding farmer participation in conservation auctions to enhance ecosystem services
Each year the KBS LTER program awards one full-year Graduate Student Fellowship. Here Leah Harris Palm-Forster describes her research that was supported by the 2014 LTER Graduate Fellowship. Leah obtained her Ph.D. working with Professor Scott Swinton in MSU's Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics and is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware in the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics. ~~ Going once, going twice, … bought from the lowest bidder! Hold on, what kind of auction is that? Why is the auctioneer buying something and why does the