Costs of land treatments on public lands in the western United States

Abstract

Public land managers often conduct rehabilitation and restoration actions to achieve desired conditions or specific natural resource objectives. These “land treatments” include a variety of techniques, such as biomass removal or manipulation, seeding, and herbicide application. Limited information exists on the costs of conducting many common types of land treatments, but such information can be paired with treatment effectiveness data to prioritize application of limited resources where they may have the greatest benefit and improve efficiency. Here, we investigated cost information recorded in the Land Treatment Digital Library, a catalog of legacy land treatment information on public lands managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management. Based on 1,701 treatment records across eleven western U.S. states, we developed empirical per-acre cost estimates for representative land treatments in eight categories: three seeding categories (aerial seeding, drill seeding, and seedling planting), prescribed burning, soil disturbance, soil stabilization, vegetation disturbance, and weed control. We evaluated spatio-temporal factors that may be associated with variation in treatment costs and found strong evidence for nonlinear decreases in per-acre costs as treatment areas increased and that per-acre treatment costs have increased in real terms in recent decades. We also found evidence that per-acre costs for drill seeding, prescribed burns, and soil stabilization increased with the average slope of the terrain of a treated area and that per-acre costs for prescribed burns, seedling planting, and soil stabilization were influenced by distance to urban areas or major roads. These results can inform planning, prioritization, and assessment of common land treatments on public lands in the western United States, in particular supporting greater consideration of costs and cost effectiveness.