EcoMarket - Conservation and Biodiversity Market Services

Habitat Enhancement and Management

Habitat enhancement and management is necessary to develop viable conservation areas and ecological processes that support sustainable populations of targeted species of wildlife and plants. Information gathered from forest and wildlife managers can be assimilated into a land use plan to provide land owners with the best and practical land use ideas for multi-resource management. FORECON EMS works with willing landowners, land trusts, watershed associations, and governmental agencies to acquire and protect high-value habitat before it is lost, degraded, or fragmented by unsustainable natural resource use and encroaching development pressures.

Conservation and Biodiversity Market Services

There are many regulatory controls that have been put into place in order to protect biodiversity. Incentive-based market programs are emerging as a mechanism to compensate landowners for actively protecting biodiversity. As the cost associated with introducing new environmental controls continues to increase, federal, state, and local governments are now turning to market mechanisms to actively conserve biodiversity. These market mechanisms include; bank and trade systems, conservation easements, tax incentives, and government-funded programs. FORECON EMS has the ability to recognize and subsequently develop an ecological resource value for various ecological assets. The value from an ecological asset or bank can come in the form of increased land value, tradable mitigation credits, or by offsetting regulatory compliance obligations.

Endangered and Threatened Species Conservation

Conservation banks are permanently protected privately or publicly owned lands that are managed for rare, threatened, and endangered species. Under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) approves habitat or species credits in exchange for permanently protecting the bank lands and managing for ESA-listed and other at-risk species. Conservation bank owners can sell these credits to developers or others who need to compensate for projects with endangered species impacts. There are many state and federal programs available that land owners can utilize for endangered and threatened species protection and habitat improvement. FORECON EMS can help clients utilize these programs and add value to land and subsequently market endangered species credits.

The eco-asset approach allows properties to be put into endangered species conservation that would not normally meet the criteria for a credit trading system. The value to land is determined by an appraiser's estimate of the value for threatened and endangered species habitat. This approach does not lead to more conservation of species but in the long term each individual parcel would most likely not have been conserved permanently. This form of conservation allows for a possible increase in land value that goes beyond the traditional real estate market value.