Changing decisions in a changing landscape: How might forest owners in an urbanizing region respond to emerging bioenergy markets?

The global bioenergy market has considerable impacts on local land use patterns, including landscapes in the Southeastern United States where increased demand for bioenergy feedstocks in the form of woody biomass is likely to affect the management and availability of forest resources. Despite extensive research investigating the productivity and impacts of different bioenergy feedstocks, relatively few studies have assessed the preferences of private landowners, who control the majority of forests in the eastern U.S., to harvest biomass for the bioenergy market. To better understand contingent behaviors given emerging biomass markets, we administered a stated preference experiment to private forest owners in the rapidly urbanizing Charlotte Metropolitan region. Respondents indicated their preferences for harvesting woody biomass under a set of hypothetical market-based scenarios with varying forest management plans and levels of economic return. Our analytical framework also incorporated data from a previously-administered revealed preference survey and spatially-explicit remote sensing data, enabling us to analyze how individuals’ ownership characteristics, their emotional connection the forests they manage, and the spatial patterns of nearby land uses, influence willingness to grow bioenergy feedstocks. We found conditional support for feedstock production, even among woodland owners with no history of active management. Landowners preferred higher economic returns for each management plan. However low-intensity harvest options were always preferred to more intensive management alternatives regardless of economic return, suggesting that these landowners may be more strongly motivated by aesthetic or quality-of-life concerns than feedstock revenues. Our analysis indicated preferences were dependent upon individual and environmental characteristics, with younger, more rural landowners significantly more interested in growing feedstocks relative to their older and more urban counterparts. While this study focuses on one small sample of urban forest owners, our results do suggest that policy makers and resource managers can better inform stand-level decision-making by understanding how feedstock production preferences vary across populations.