The Impact of Natural Amenities on Home Values in Western Colorado

This paper investigates the impact that proximity to natural amenities has on improving home values in Mesa County, Colorado. Controlling for standard home characteristics, the study investigates the value to homes of the proximity to trails, the Colorado National Monument, Bureau of Land Management Land, golf courses, the Colorado/Gunnison River, open space, and public parks, using ordinary least squares, fixed effects (controlling for time and zip codes), and a spatial error model. GIS is used to determine distances for the spatial econometric model. Each amenity is evaluated at 250, 500, and 1000 meters. The results show that homes located within 250 meters of a trail sell for 4.45% more, homes located within 500 meters of BLM land sell for 9.07% more, homes located within 250 meters of a golf course sell for 12.70% more, and homes located within 250 meters of the Colorado National Monument sell for 12.90% more.

Valuation of Drought Information: Understanding the Value of the US Drought Monitor in Land Management

Droughts affect recreation and tourism, grazing, forests, and timber, and can have important indirect effects for the ecosystems and species that rely on water. Despite its importance, the effect of drought in the land management sector is less understood than in other water-intensive sectors, such as agriculture and public water supplies. This study presents the first-ever estimates of the economic valuation of the information provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor using the avoided cost method. These estimates are based on the time and labor saved by using the U.S. Drought Monitor rather than compiling drought-related information from other sources, or using other sources for tracking/monitoring droughts, communicating drought conditions, and dealing with drought-related issues. The results reflect rational behavior—the more time needed to compile or collect drought information provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor, the higher the dollar value in avoided cost. This dollar amount also varies by institution and organization, which indicates respondents from different organizations value the information from the U.S. Drought Monitor differently. For example, compared to the state offices, the field offices in the Bureau of Land Management value more of the information provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor. These estimates can be used to estimate the societal benefits and help policy makers evaluate the U.S. Drought Monitor in different sectors.

Camping off the grid in the grid: Between hospitable space and inhospitable land

When the last U.S. Census canvassed Slab City, a remote, self-governed community of artists, retirees, anarchists and homeless people in southern California’s desert, most of its residents claimed ownership of the plots they occupied as “free and clear.” And yet Slab City itself occupies land that is public, as firm in this designation as the resolve of those who live there. Often called the “last free place,” this square-mile plot is one of the remaining Section 36 areas, which were originally reserved for the state’s public schools when each township was laid out by the National Ordinance’s land surveys that blanketed the American West in an invisible but all-encompassing grid. Consequently, the state of California hosts an array of one-square mile pockets of land. Among these, Slab City is a camp that bears the ongoing question of how land—environmentally inhospitable yet relatively hospitable in its public status—might host practices of self-determination, self-regulated community, and national identity. Veritable blind spots of land management, Section 36 areas contrast other more regulated, though comparable, practices on public and private lands. The Bureau of Land Management oversees Long Term Visitor Areas where campers can park trailers across vast territories for extended periods of time, and Walmart plays host to cross-country travelers who overnight in its parking lots—a permutation of recreational camping known as boondocking. But what happens in the absence of oversight? In places where the campsites become permanent? In times when those living there have arrived not only by choice but also in many cases out of necessity? Legacies of a country’s organizational matrix, Section 36’s pockets of land linger as residual pieces of frontier mythologies, as testaments of the arbitrariness of the grid and its land policies, and as fertile ground for alternative practices of adapting to inhospitable environments and making home in improvised communities. This essay seeks to understand how Section 36 land hosts contemporary intersections of public space and freedom.

Vegetation Classification Exercise for the Pawnee National Grasslands, USA

Aims: Vegetation classifications are useful for a variety of management purposes as well as scientific exploration. Local classifications are common throughout the United States but only recently have been integrated into a national classification system, which is now expected for local classifications. Study Area: The Pawnee National Grasslands (PNG) in northeastern Colorado, USA, has not been classified using plot data, and is thus a gap on the baseline knowledge of the PNG plant communities that hinders impact assessment of various anthropogenic activities. Methods: Here, we use 128 plots to classify the vegetation of the PNG using a two-step process: first, classifying the PNG plots alone to characterize local uniqueness, and then employing a semi-supervised classification with an additional 64 plots from areas to the north and east of the PNG, using standard classification procedures. Results: We document on the PNG the occurrence of two Classes, three Subclasses, four Formations, five Divisions, six Macrogroups, seven Groups and eight Alliances and Associations already described in the USNVC. Conclusions: The PNG is dominated by the Bouteloua gracilis-Buchloe dactyloides Grassland Association, which we further subdivide and describe as three local subassociations. The mixed-grass concepts in the USNVC do not exist in the PNG. Taxonomic reference: Hazlett (1998). Syntaxonomic reference: USNVC (2016). Abbreviations: BLM = Bureau of Land Management; CPER = Central Plains Experimental Range; ESA = Ecological Society of America; EST = Ecological Site Type; GPS UTM = Global Positioning System Universal Transverse Mercator; NEON = National Ecological Observatory Network; PNG = Pawnee National Grasslands; USNVC = United States Vegetation Classification.

Recovering Looted Artifacts and the Art of Deciding What to Curate: The Cerberus Collection

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is steward to vast cultural resources across public lands and in museum collections. Like other land-managing agencies, its resource protection strategy includes Federal enforcement of cultural property laws. Between 2007 and 2013, a case code-named Operation: Cerberus Action recovered more than 100,000 objects, mainly consisting of artifacts from the American Southwest, through undercover operations, evidence gathering, seizure, and forfeiture. Prized by collectors and stockpiled as part of illicit ventures, most of the artifacts have little-to-no provenience. To address the immense quantity of material and best meet the public interest, the BLM developed a decision-tree with criteria to determine appropriate disposition options. This process involved three intensive phases: (1) identification; (2) return or repatriation; and (3) assessment of the remaining items to inform disposition based on specific criteria. In this third phase, artifacts are categorized for curation, education, conveyance to tribes beyond the scope of NAGPRA, another public use, or ultimately, destruction. This paper summarizes the case, addresses the legal foundations for determining ownership, presents the significance criteria for disposition, and concludes with a reflection on the opportunities and challenges of this endeavor, which may guide similar efforts in the future.

From Grandma’s Attic to Amnesty Programs: Adventures in Accessioning Archeological Collections

Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum (the Center) located in Dolores, Colorado is a federal Bureau of Land Management curation facility for archeological collections generated from permitted projects on public lands in southwest Colorado. As with many museums, the Center receives artifacts without contextual information that were collected without permits and transferred through a variety of sources like law enforcement actions. Numerous donation scenarios are provided. The curation of artifacts without provenience or contextual information can be difficult to justify because of high curation costs and limited space. However, the Center has identified and clarified the value of unprovenienced collections and found paths to provide public benefit through the application of Department of Interior and Bureau of Land Management policy and guidance.

Spotted Owls

This chapter looks at the author's experience looking for Mexican spotted owls in Scheelite Canyon in the Huachucas. Like most people living in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the author had never heard a spotted owl's high-pitched four-note bark. The one-and-a-half pound owl became an inadvertent celebrity. The spotted owl emerged as an indicator species not just of forest health, but of a fevered nation's political temperature. The bird's fate provoked legal fisticuffs between two federal agencies, the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service. By the early 1990s, the spotted owl seemed to have migrated opportunistically from the ancient forests it had favored historically to a whole new ecological niche in the federal court system.

Climate Change, Agency Decision-Making, and the Resilience of Land-Based Livelihoods

Many rural communities in the western United States are surrounded by public lands and are dependent on these landscapes for their livelihoods. Climate change threatens to affect land-based livelihoods through both direct impacts and public land agency decision-making in response to impacts. This project was designed to understand how Bureau of Land Management (BLM) permittees, including ranching and recreation-based businesses in Colorado, are vulnerable to both climate change and management responses and how permittees and the BLM are adapting and could adapt to these changes. We conducted 60 interviews in two BLM field offices to gather permittee and agency employees’ observations of change, impacts, responses, and suggestions for adaptive actions. Data suggested that permittees are dependent on BLM lands and are sensitive to ecological and management changes and that current management policies and structures are often a constraint to adaptation. Managers and permittees are already seeing synergistic impacts, and the BLM has capacity to facilitate or constrain adaptation actions. Participants suggested increased flexibility at all scales, timelier within-season adjustments, and extension of current collaborative efforts to assist adaptation efforts and reduce impacts to these livelihoods.