DEVELOPING A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO FARMLAND PROTECTION PLANNING BASED ON ECOSYSTEM SERVICES, CLIMATE RESILIENCY, AND SOCIAL ACCEPTABILITY

The U.S. is losing 2,000 acres/day of croplands to development, and 40% of the loss occurs on the nation's most productive, versatile, and climate resilient agricultural lands. It is not possible to protect all farmland from development, but there is broad consensus that we should try to protect high-priority agricultural lands. This project develops a systematic, data-driven approach for prioritizing where and how to protect farmland in regions facing increasing development pressures. Our study area is the Snake River Plain of Idaho, which produces >80 different agricultural products, and has global importance in the production of various specialty products, including seed, dairy, hops, wine, sugar beets, barley, pulses and potatoes. The region is also a hotspot of human population growth, and the rapid development has stimulated a nascent but highly-motivated policy and practitioner community focused on farmland protection. In this project, we will develop a Farmland Protection Planning (FPP) framework where we a) map ecosystem services using spatial modeling approaches, b) identify priority areas for protection based on ecosystem services, productivity and climate resilience using optimization algorithms, c) measure social factors influencing farmland protection using qualitative social science methods, and d) create a 'Farmland Protection Planning Handbook' for practitioners that integrates the spatial maps of prioritized farmland with insights gained from the social science component. The FPP Handbook will enable our stakeholder partners to more effectively prioritize farmland protection, and the FPP framework that we develop will be directly applicable to other regions of the country experiencing agricultural land loss.