Along the coast of southern Maine, the need to conserve natural buffers in order to protect rivers and wetlands has become a focal point for tensions between development and conservation interests. In this rapidly developing landscape, decision-makers often feel they must choose development over conservation or restoration to support local economies. While there is scientific evidence that underscores the value of protecting natural buffers around sensitive water bodies, local decision-makers need additional place-based, economic information about the ecosystem services that these lands provide and the range of tradeoffs that are implied in related land use decisions.

This webinar, "Valuing Ecosystem Services: An Economist's Perspective," describes ecosystem service valuation from an economist's perspective and can be viewed with the Cisco WebEx Player (download here first to watch webinar).