Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI) methods. We combine a simulation approach with a case study of forests in the eastern United States, paying particular attention to how covariation between ecological benefits and economic costs influences agreement levels. For many conservation goals, agreement over spatial priorities improves with ROI methods. However, we also show that a reliance on ROI-based prioritization can sometimes exacerbate disagreements over priorities. As such, accounting for costs in conservation planning does not enable society to sidestep careful consideration of the ecological goals of conservation.

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This research uses an econometric model to analyze the factors affecting nonindustrial private forest landowners' choice of intermediate forest management practices, and to examine how these choices might change in response to incentives for carbon sequestration. We also use parameter estimates to simulate the carbon sequestration potential for different combinations of management practices, and compare the effectiveness and costs of carbon sequestration-based and practice-based incentive payment schemes. Our results suggest that incentive payments increase the probability that desirable combinations of management practices are adopted. Simulation results indicate that incentives targeting fertilization yield the highest carbon sequestration potential, and that a carbon-based payment scheme produces higher carbon sequestration than a practice-based payments scheme.