Economic impacts of agriculture - soil erosion and wetland degradation

This book presents the dynamic and cumulative effects of soil erosion on on-farm economy and its off-site effects on inland wetland services. To quantify and value these damages two procedures rely on a limited data set are developed, one of which to estimate the shadow price of soil erosion by using survey data and RUSLE 2. The other allows us to estimate the off-site impacts of soil erosion on wetland services using multiperiod analysis of satellite imagines and productivity approach. These procedures are applied in a watershed of about 1.4 million hectares located in the south of Cordoba, Argentina, where agricultural modernization driven mainly by market forces has been gradually transforming low input agriculture, causing an increase in production but at the same time reducing the long-term productivity of farmland and degrading wetlands. The book give some light to estimate physical and economic damage for scientists, ecologists, economists and professionals that have to deal with scarce or no experimental data to establish a baseline for policy recommendations on wetland restoration, soil conservation or watershed management.