Book re6iew 535 Although the articles were written before the
final agreement on Agenda 2000, they still reflect the impending problems related to CAP, the inter-national order and the environment.
Jan Otto Andersson
Reader in International Economics,
Abo Akademi Uni6ersity,
20500 Abo,
Finland
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Spatial Optimization for Managed Ecosystems, by John Hof and Michael Bevers. Columbia Univer-sity Press, New York, 1999, 258 pp. ISBN 0-231-10637-8 (paper), 0-231-10636-X (cloth)
This book examines optimisation of use and management of ecosystems, with a particular fo-cus on capturing spatial ecosystem relationships and processes in ecosystems. The book is based on material that has been previously published in journals, especially Forest Science. It contains dozens of examples and offers a useful glimpse of the spatial aspects of topics as varied as pestilence, diversity, recreation, and water runoff, mainly in forest ecosystems. This broad range of topics and detailed examples emphasises the im-portance of spatial considerations in management actions across the landscape within which an ecosystem functions.
The book can be divided into four parts that deal with the following issues: traditional natural resource optimisation approaches using linear programming; stochastic relationships and hence spatial autocorrelation; spatial processes that take place in forest ecosystems, primarily dynamic movement; and the inclusion of biodiversity and sustainability in ecosystem management objective functions. Each part opens with basic concepts and problems. Specific examples illuminate the various optimisation models.
The first part of the book discusses static, spa-tial relationships that reflect how distances, sizes and shapes of landscape elements, species (includ-ing human be(includ-ings) and vegetation affect each
other in a system across the landscape. Chapters 2 and 3 describe wildlife habitat examples and deal with degrees of connectivity, wildlife habitat size threshold for population viability, and the amount of edge between a mature stand of timber and a cutover area (the so-called edge effects). These two well-written chapters discuss the basic methods, using cellular — or raster — (chapter 2) and geometric — or vector — (chapter 3) formulations for capturing spatial relationships in an optimisation context. Chapter 4 is the only part of the book that emphasises an economic aspect, namely, efficiency. This chapter seems to be primarily written for economists. However, the approach is a little bit disappointing. A travel cost model of recreation demand is explored without giving any motivation. Furthermore, much of this chapter is based on an article that was published in 1983. As a consequence, the approach is mainly based on literature from the 1970s.
Managed ecosystems are expected to exhibit considerable random, or chaotic, behaviour. This randomness often includes a significant spatial component, or spatial autocorrelation, as many sources that disturb ecosystem behaviour are spa-tially defined. If the presence of some disturbance in a sampling unit makes its presence in neigh-bouring locations more or less likely, the distur-bance exhibits spatial autocorrelation. It implies a lack of spatial independence, as the proximity of sites indicates shared vulnerability of weather, fire, insect and disease outbreaks, and so forth. The second part of the book discusses the phe-nomenon of spatial autocorrelation. Chapters 5 and 6 are based on cellular and geometric formu-lations, respectively. In contrast to the first part of the book where linear programming took centre stage, non-linear methods and solution proce-dures are used in these two chapters. Chapter 7 describes some approaches to handling risk and uncertainty. It explores methods in case non-lin-ear approaches are not practical, for example, in situations where complexity is substantial.
Part 3 deals with another spatial aspect of managed ecosystems, namely, movement of wildlife populations. Chapter 8 addresses wildlife habitat connectivity or fragmentation by directly modelling wildlife population growth and disper
Book re6iew 536
sal. The following chapter uses the framework of chapter 8 to describe a real-world example of recovery of an endangered species, namely, the black-footed ferret in South Dakota. In chapter 10 the problem of dynamic pest management is addressed. Chapter 11 deals with a nested-sched-ule model of stormflow. Because of the dynamic complexity, all the models in this part of the book use the cellular management variable definitions. All in all, part 3 provides some interesting insights into the spatial processes that take place in forest ecosystems.
Part 4 presents an ecological – economic per-spective on optimising the distribution of diverse habitat types. This is perhaps the most interesting part of the book for ecological economists as it focuses on capturing considerations such as bio-logical diversity and sustainability in objective functions. Chapter 12 develops specific species-richness objective functions. It examines the prob-lem of allocating habitat types to species so as to optimise species richness and equity. Chapter 13 provides an analysis of optimised species-richness equilibria that are sustainable over the long term. Regrettably, the authors do not treat genetic di-versity, although they are aware of the fact that several recent papers have discussed methods for using measurements of genetic distances between species to construct an overall measure of genetic diversity.
Chapter 14 attempts to step back and synthe-sise the variety of material on spatial optimisation in the four different parts of the book. The au-thors express the ultimate hope that the book provides some small impetus for integrated mod-elling using optimisation methods.
This unique book is designed as an ideal intro-duction to the new field of spatial optimisation in the management of ecosystems for ecologists, con-servation biologists and advanced undergraduate and graduate students of ecology and resource management. Despite the evident importance of this approach, the mathematical presentation may be hard to absorb by some readers of the book. On the other hand, mathematics is balanced with simple examples and plain and illuminating figures. These make it possible to skip the math and still understand the general idea. This book
not only serves natural scientists, but also pro-vides a tour of the field for economists. Any of the methods described in parts 1 – 3 can be easily extended with economic objective functions to come up with integrated models for capturing spatial relationships in ecosystems. As an economist, I found the fourth part especially in-formative, as it explores how to deal with non-economic objective functions.
C. Martijn van der Heide
Department of Spatial Economics,
Free Uni6ersity,
Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
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Pri7ileged Goods:Commoditization and its Impact
on En7ironment and Society, Edited by Jack P. Manno, 2000. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 267 pp. ISBN 1-566-70390-5
An ongoing debate in ecological economics concerns the degree to which the value of goods and services of nature — natural capital — can be captured and made apparent to people. In this interesting and potentially controversial book, Jack Manno argues that much of natural capital, like much of social capital, is undervalued because it cannot be turned into marketable commodities. Although this is hardly news for either economists or ecologists, Manno develops a thesis that never-theless provides new insight into why economies have increasingly marginalized many aspects of nature and society. It also means that the path to sustainable development will be a tough one to pursue.
According to this thesis, all things can be di-vided up along a gradient of ‘commodity poten-tial’. Items and processes that have high commodity potential (HCP) share certain charac-teristics which make them easier to package, mar-ket, and sell than those with low commodity potential (LCP). Because of this, the HCP goods and services are ‘privileged’ or favored by market economies, and receive disproportionately higher
