We investigated the livestock farms surrounding the Waterberg Plateau Park in north-central Namibia to assess farmer attitudes, management techniques, financial impacts, as well as the potential benefits of tourism and trophy hunting, with respect to leopard Panthera pardus conservation. Farmers were asked about their use of six livestock husbandry techniques and farmers who employed at least one had 85% less reported conflict than farmers not employing any. Livestock farmers lost on average 3.8% of their calves to depredation annually (US$1370 per farm per year) but were willing to lose 3.3%, a difference of only US$180 per farm or US$3064 regionally. Where losses were higher than stated tolerance, we found that potential benefits from tourism and trophy hunting could offset losses. Surveys with tourists and professional hunters in the region strengthened this conclusion.

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Estimated total value for recreational shellfishing on Cape Cod was $7.4 million in 2002, based on results of a survey of 233 shellfish permit holders, a figure that has roughly kept pace with inflation based on a similar study conducted in 1975. The total value is made up of two components, the actual permit fees collected ($387,000) and an estimate of consumer surplus, which was based on willingness to accept compensation to give up a fishing permit and hence is unbounded by the survey respondents' income. An estimate based on willingness-to-pay (WTP) gave a total value estimate of $1.0 million in 2002. Additionally, participation in recreational shellfishing has fallen precipitously from 19,068 resident permits sold in 1975 to the 10,639 permits sold in 2002. The decline in the total number of resident shellfishers is counteracted, in part, by rises in the number of senior and nonresident permit holders in 2002 to 2,766 and 2,704 respectively. An individual's valuation of recreational shellfishing appears to be significantly influenced by a number of factors including: the distance traveled to the shellfishing flats, the number of shellfishing trips in the prior year, the number of years a permit has been held, the permit fee paid and the individual's income level.

ABSTRACT. As Fred Kniffen observed, vernacular buildings identify culture and record our relationships with physical and social environment. Influenced by Kniffen, twentieth-century cultural geographers used spatially correlated log homebuilding attributes as diagnostics. The present study used a qualitative meta-study approach to evaluate studies citing such correlations in the eastern temperate forests of North America. Forty-two studies involving sixty-three geographic entities and twenty-two attribute types were evaluated. The meta-study's findings were consistent with an Eastern Woodlands regional model described by Kniffen, Terry Jordan, and Wilbur Zelinsky. A majority of the spatially correlated attributes involved building materials, cited cultural and/or environmental influences to explain their findings, and cited correlations at state/province or county scales. Today, identification of building culture undoubtedly continues to offer potential guidance to sustainability efforts, and, although untapped, vernacular building continues to offer potential as a key diagnostic. Keywords: cultural geography, qualitative meta-study, vernacular architecture, building culture, sustainability.When Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups (1987) critiqued Fred Kniffen's (1965) assertion that folk housing provided the most reliable diagnostic of North American occupancy patterns and culture 1 diffusion, they questioned Kniffen's methodology rather than his conclusions. Many researchers, including Jordan, had followed Kniffen's example in applying material-geographic methods to investigating settlement patterns. Jordan and Kaups argued that Kniffen's results had only been descriptive. In their view, failure to recognize artifacts in their cultural and ecological context had resulted in a failure to explain cultural origins and, therefore, patterns of diffusion.2 The criticism was valid, although it is unclear if Kniffen thought that he had proved his assertion. After all, the first geographic task-identifying spatial variance-is descriptive and does not offer an explanation. It is undeniable that vernacular buildings both structure and record our relationship with the physical and social environment, as suggested by Kniffen. Building necessitates knowledge of occupancy requirements, building materials and techniques, and environmental factors. As a result, areal distributions of building attributes (Kniffen and Glassie 1966) evidence systematic interactions between environmental and cultural factors. As Kniffen (1965) noted, geographers from Jean Brunhes (1920) to John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1952) have described housing as a basic fact of human geography.George Woolston presented a related narrative from a design perspective when he suggested that traditional buildings represent a "sort of gene pool of k DR. PETERS recently completed his doctorate in forestry in the environmental conservation department at