Balancing the goals of sustainable planning under climate and land use change (CLUC) with ecosystem service functions is a huge challenge for the management and programming of protected areas today. We construct a new evaluation framework towards the perspectives of sustainable land management based on the choice experiment (CE) model, and apply it to investigate the public's preferences for the forest parks in Taiwan. This study found that implementing organic farming, increasing species populations, increasing the acreage of secondary forest area, and developing an integrated framework for ecotourism would best satisfy the public's preferences for sustainable land use management. Second, we identify that the heterogeneity of the public's preferences for forest park management varies depending on whether individuals are (1) members of environmental groups, (2) agricultural landowners, and (3) residents of the municipality. Third, we find integrated land use programs generate the highest welfare values among scenarios comprising different financial attributes.

Taiwan’s Agricultural Development Act (ADA) of 2000 relaxed farmland ownership criteria and allowed non-farmers to own farms. Although this opened up the market and induced a growth in farmland trading, relaxing these criteria without proper monitoring resulted in rapid development of farmhouses that fragmented farmlands, adversely affecting agricultural production and the quality of peri-urban environments, and increased management difficulties. Relaxing farmland ownership criteria also provided opportunities for speculation, which pushed up farmland prices, causing farmland price to deviate from its production value. We used a price:value ratio as an index of price-value distortion to explore farmland price-value distortion spatially using a geographical information system (GIS). Yilan County was used as a case study since its agricultural lands suffer high development pressure due to ready accessibility from the Taipei metropolitan area. Ordinary least square and quantile regression were used to identify factors driving distortion in Yilan County. Finally, we discuss the distortion and key factors for specific sites in Yilan to assess the urban sprawl and propose a preliminary course of action for peri-urban growth management. Our findings suggest that residential activities stimulate farmland price-value distortion but do not enhance farmland value. Designation of a land parcel as agricultural within an urban area allows for speculation and increases distortion. The land parcel’s association with infrastructure such as road and irrigation systems, and the price of agricultural products, are significantly correlated with distortion. Most of these identified factors increased farmland price because of the potential for non-agricultural land-use. We propose that to resolve farmland price-value distortion in Yilan, multi-functional values, in addition to agriculture, must be envisioned.

This paper aims to build up a preference function to evaluate the public benefits of the type of agricultural farming, biodiversity, water provisions, land use type, ecotourism modes, and a monetary attribute (environmental trust fund and willingness to contribute) associated with an ecosystem service and land use program in a forest park. This study used the choice experiments to build a random utility model, analyze the average preference for the above land use attributes based on the conditional logit and used a latent class model to test the resident’s heterogeneous preferences for land use planning in the forest park. We also estimated the welfare derived from various land use programs. The empirical result had shown that: (1) increasing organic farming area, maintaining the status quo of species biodiversity, increasing the surface water provision, increasing the area of custom flora, increasing the wetland area, and setting up an integrated framework for ecotourism increase the public’s preference for the land use program; (2) we found that farmer and non-farmer haven’t the same land use preferences; (3) the ecotourism development program incorporating biodiversity, organic farming, ethnobotany, and wetland area with integrated ecotourism are more preferred than other land use program scenarios.