Aspects of ecosystem persistence and the optimal conservation of species

Abstract

Although ecologists have long recognized the salience of persistence in determining the static and the dynamic behavior of ecological systems, it is only very recently that economists have begun to study this concept in relation to the use of services that are provi8ded by jointly determined ecological-economic systems (ecosystems). As such, there are very few studies of ecosystems that explicitly analyze the ecological and the economic aspects of this use issue. Given this state of affairs, this article has two objectives. First, a new method is used to formally describe and bound the notion of ecosystem persistence. This method explicitly incorporates the stochastic aspects of ecosystems. Second, the bound on persistence is used to study the problem of optimal species conservation.