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Exploring Environmental and Economic Trade-offs Associated with Aggregate Recycling from Decommissioned Forest Roads

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Abstract

Forest road decommissioning is a pro-active mechanism for preventing future habitat degradation and for increasing the likelihood of endangered salmonid survival in the western U.S. High implementation costs however preclude many desirable projects from being undertaken, especially on federally owned land. Previous research and real-world applications have demonstrated the cost savings potential of reusing aggregate recovered from forest roads during decommissioning. These cost savings can effectively subsidize decommissioning projects, suggesting an economic benefit associated with improving environmental benefit. We present a mixed integer, multiple objective formulation to identify the efficient trade-off surface between conflicting economic and environmental criteria, where environmental benefit is defined as the hazard weighted length of roads decommissioned. We compare nondominated frontiers identified with and without the opportunity to recycle aggregate. Our results suggest that aggregate recycling promotes a synergistic relationship between cost savings (subsidy) and environmental performance, where subsidies generally increase with increasing environmental performance. Effective subsidy values can reach 31% of total expenditure, at the maximum level of environmental benefit. Transportation managers are therefore able to recover and reuse a nonrenewable resource, while at the same time promoting economic and environmental efficiency.

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Notes

  1. Foltz and Truebe [4] considered runoff volume and sediment production in response to simulated rainfall, and rut depth in response to simulated log truck traffic.

  2. http://www.institute.redlands.edu/emds/

  3. Attributes removed from our abbreviated model include information on precipitation, road surface type, a soil erodibility factor, and metrics on the biological condition of aquatic habitat. Since the intent is to describe the relative risk of each road segment, attributes that would be identical for all segments were removed from the model.

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Acknowledgments

The primary author completed most of this work while a graduate student at Oregon State University as the recipient of the Wes and Nancy Lematta and the Dorothy M. Hoener fellowships. The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rocky Mountain Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Missoula, MT, USA

    Matthew P. Thompson

  2. Forest Engineering, Resources and Management Department, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    John Sessions

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Correspondence to Matthew P. Thompson.

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Thompson, M.P., Sessions, J. Exploring Environmental and Economic Trade-offs Associated with Aggregate Recycling from Decommissioned Forest Roads. Environ Model Assess 15, 419–432 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10666-010-9220-8

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