  Market-based instruments such as payments, auctions or tradable permits have
been proposed as flexible and cost-effective instruments for biodiversity
conservation on private lands. Trading the service of conservation requires one
to define a metric that determines the extent to which a conserved site adds to
the regional conservation objective. Yet, while markets for conservation are
widely discussed and increasingly applied, little research has been conducted
on explicitly accounting for spatial ecological processes in the trading. In
this paper, we use a coupled ecological economic simulation model to examine
how spatial connectivity may be considered in the financial incentives created
by a market-based conservation scheme. Land use decisions, driven by changing
conservation costs and the conservation market, are simulated by an agent-based
model of land users. On top of that, a metapopulation model evaluates the
conservational success of the market. We find that optimal spatial incentives
for agents correlate with species characteristics such as the dispersal
distance, but they also depend on the spatio-temporal distribution of
conservation costs. We conclude that a combined analysis of ecological and
socio-economic conditions should be applied when designing market instruments
to protect biodiversity.
