This report presents summary statistics and other results of a survey of Clear Lake visitors and residents. Drawing on survey results, the authors present information on recreational usage of the lake, attitudes of recreators and local residents toward possible watershed management changes, and estimates of visitors' and residents' willingness to pay for water quality improvements at the lake. Support for the survey was provided by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

This article models the recreation demand for Iowa wetlands, combining survey data on both actual usage patterns (i.e., revealed preferences (RPs)) and anticipated changes to those patterns under hypothetical increases in trip costs (i.e., stated preferences (SPs)). We formulate and test specific hypotheses concerning potential sources of bias in each approach and discuss what can be learned about the validity of the models from such tests.

Agricultural tillage practices are important human-induced activities that can alter carbon emissions from agricultural soils and have the potential to significantly contribute to reductions in greenhouse gas emission (Lal et al, 1998). This research investigates the expected costs of sequestering carbon in agricultural soils under different subsidy and market-based policies. Using the detailed National Resources Inventory data, we estimate the probability that farmers adopt conservation tillage practices based on a variety of exogenous characteristics and profit from conventional practices. These estimates are used with physical models of carbon sequestration to estimate the subsidy costs of achieving increased carbon sequestration with alternative subsidy schemes.

In a static setting, willingness to pay for an environmental improvement is equal to compensating variation. However, in a dynamic setting characterized by uncertainty, irreversibility, and the potential for learning, willingness to pay may also contain an option value. In this paper, we incorporate the dynamic nature of the value formulation process into a study using a contingent valuation method, designed to measure the value local residents assign to a north-central Iowa lake. Our results show that willingness to pay is highly sensitive to the potential for future learning. Respondents offered the opportunity to delay their purchasing decisions until more information became available were willing to pay significantly less for improved water quality than those who faced a now-or-never decision. The results suggest that welfare analysts should take care to accurately represent the potential for future learning.

The authors model the recreation demand for Iowa wetlands, combining survey data on both actual usage patterns (i.e., revealed preferences) and anticipated changes to those patterns under hypothetical increases in trip costs (i.e., stated preferences). They formulate and test specific hypotheses concerning potential sources of bias in each data type and consistently reject consistency between the two data sources, both in terms of implied wetland values and underlying preference parameters. The authors pay careful attention to the interpretations of the test results, noting particularly how the interpretation of the same results can vary with the "school of thought" of the reader.

Understanding how Iowans view the benefits and costs of wetlands preservation is key to making decisions about the future of wetlands in Iowa. To that end, the authors created "The Iowa Wetlands Survey." How the survey was designed and administered is described and the results are summarized. The survey reveals important information about how Iowans use wetlands, what they know about wetlands, and how much they value preserving them.

As Congress develops new farm legislation, some are lobbying for a new partnership between U.S. taxpayers and farmers. In exchange for an annual transfer of $10 to $20billion from taxpayers to agriculture, farmers would do much more to enhance environmental quality. An attractive feature of a new partnership is that paying for an improved environment provides a clear and justifiable rationale for farm program payments, something that is lacking under current farm programs. By changing management practices and land use, farmers can provide cleaner water, cleaner air, better wildlife habitat, lower net greenhouse gas emissions, and improved long-run soil quality. Private profit maximizers largely ignore the value of these environmental goods. Hence, the goods are underprovided. Having government step in to increase their supply may increase economic efficiency. New, highly funded conservation payment programs for agriculture could achieve both the current income support objective of farm programs as well as environmental objectives if program payments are targeted to achieve environmental benefits rather than targeted to low-income producers. Significant reductions in environmental benefits will occur if payment limits or means testing is used to target payments, unless low-income farmers provide the highest environmental benefits. For many farms, the potential quantity of environmental benefits that can be produced is proportionate to farm acreage. The two basic approaches to conservation payments are (1) voluntary programs that pay farmers for specific actions they take, and (2) programs that penalize farmers with taxes or disqualification from other program benefits if prescribed actions are not followed. The first approach is preferred if agricultural income enhancement is a goal. Also, it is doubtful that the second approach is political feasible given that farmers will be asked to give up the ?no strings? income support they have enjoyed in recent years. Past conservation programs have taught us three key lessons. The first is that making payments based on environmental benefit-to-cost ratios can greatly enhance program efficiency by either cutting the cost of meeting an environmental objective or by greatly increasing the amount of environmental benefits that can be obtained from a given expenditure. Second, adequate verification, monitoring, and enforcement programs will need to be put in place if the promised environmental benefits are to be realized. And third, land set-asides are the most costly way of obtaining environmental benefits. When possible, it is more efficient to encourage productive use of land rather than to retire land. So, for example, instead of paying a farmer to remove land from production in order to reduce nitrate water pollution, a program would pay the farmer to adopt practices that reduce the risk of fertilizer runoff.

The water quality in Iowa’s lakes has been a hot topic lately. Concerns about the water quality in many of the state’s lakes have brought increased attention to the value of the lakes as a recreational resource. One lake that has experienced recent water quality problems, as well as the accompanying publicity, is Clear Lake, located in Cerro Gordo County.

Each spring and summer in the Gulf of Mexico, nutrient-rich ef- fl uent from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers stimulates algae growth. The rates of growth are typically so high that when the algae die and decompose, they consume more dissolved oxygen than can be replenished by the ocean. The Gulf hypoxic zone or “dead zone” is created when dissolved oxygen levels become too low to support sea life.

The important questions about agriculture, climate, and sustainability have become increasingly complex and require a coordinated, multifaceted approach for developing new knowledge and understanding. A multistate, transdisciplinary project was begun in 2011 to study the potential for both mitigation and adaptation of corn-based cropping systems to climate variations. The team is measuring the baseline as well as change of the system's carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and water footprints, crop productivity, and pest pressure in response to existing and novel production practices. Nine states and 11 institutions are participating in the project, necessitating a well thought out approach to coordinating field data collection procedures at 35 research sites. In addition, the collected data must be brought together in a way that can be stored and used by persons not originally involved in the data collection, necessitating robust procedures for linking metadata with the data and clearly delineated rules for use and publication of data from the overall project. In order to improve the ability to compare data across sites and begin to make inferences about soil and cropping system responses to climate across the region, detailed research protocols were developed to standardize the types of measurements taken and the specific details such as depth, time, method, numbers of samples, and minimum data set required from each site. This process required significant time, debate, and commitment of all the investigators involved with field data collection and was also informed by the data needed to run the simulation models and life cycle analyses. Although individual research teams are collecting additional measurements beyond those stated in the standardized protocols, the written protocols are used by the team for the base measurements to be compared across the region. A centralized database was constructed to meet the needs of current researchers on this project as well as for future use for data synthesis and modeling for agricultural, ecosystem, and climate sciences.