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Ecological Production Functions: A Theoretical and Practical Exploration
Citation:
MACPHERSON, A. J. Ecological Production Functions: A Theoretical and Practical Exploration. Presented at United States Society for Ecological Economics Conference, Washington, DC, May 31 - June 03, 2009.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation
Description:
Ecological production functions characterize relationships between ecosystem condition, management practices, and the delivery of economically valuable ecosystem services. Many in the ecosystem service research community view ecological research directed toward developing ecological production functions as a priority in the hope that the production functions can be passed to economists for use in valuation exercises. While the estimation of ecological production functions is an important endeavor, there is ambiguity between the economic and ecological modeling communities about what is meant by “production function” that hinders interdisciplinary progress. I seek to clarify how the key disciplines in this exchange conceive of production and estimate production empirically to help identify commonalities and differences. With the conceptual preliminaries in place, I explore how economic approaches to scale may be used in estimating ecological production functions that retain ecological and economic meaning. I also explore the utility of nonparametric efficiency and productivity analysis in empirically evaluating economic-ecological processes characterized by production of multiple outputs from multiple inputs across multiple scales.