Browsing by Author "Taff, Steven J."

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Agricultural Land Conversion in the Twin Cities: Part II, the National Resources Inventory
    (2001-07) Wegner, Thomas D.; Ploetz, Susan; Taff, Steven J.
    We divided the thirteen-county Twin Cities Metropolitan Statistical Area into a "core" and a "fringe" of seven and six counties, respectively. The National Resources Inventory estimates that 170 thousand acres of the Core were converted from agriculture to other uses between 1982 and 1987, while only about 46 thousand acres of the Fringe were so converted. The conversion rate was much greater in the Core than on the Fringe according to the NRI but not according to the Census of Agriculture. The number of acres of agricultural land converted for each new resident ranged from 0.15 in Sherburne County to 2.49 in Pierce County. Viewed another way, the increase in urban land to house new residents ranged from 0.28 in Ramsey County to 1.23 acres per person in Isanti County.
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    Assessing the financial effects associated with implementing Minnesota's timber harvesting and forest management guidelines.
    (University of Minnesota, 2000-09) Blinn, Charles R.; Taff, Steven J.; Thompson, Michael J.; Mlinar, Marsha; Townsend, Neil
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    Assessing trends in forest parcelization and development in Minnesota : an Itasca County case study.
    (University of Minnesota, 2007-07) Mundell, Joseph; Taff, Steven J.; Kilgore, Michael A.; Snyder, Stephanie
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    The Conservation Reserve Program in Minnesota: 1986-89 Enrollment Characteristics and Program Impacts
    (Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, 1989) Taff, Steven J.
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    Fiscal and Market Impacts of Conservation Easements in Minnesota
    (University of Minnesota, 2014-07) Petri, Carl-Philipp; Kilgore, Michael A.; Taff, Steven J.
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    Forest Land Parcelization in Northern Minnesota: A Multicounty Assessment
    (University of Minnesota, 2010-12) Block-Torgerson, Kayla; Kilgore, Michael A.; Taff, Steven J.; Snyder, Stephanie
    Parcelization, the subdivision of land into smaller ownership parcels, is a phenomenon affecting private forest land across the nation, including Minnesota. Forest land parcelization has been found to have a marked adverse effect on wildlife habitat, timber availability, water quality, and recreational access. In 2005, the Minnesota Forest Resources Council (MFRC) identified forest parcelization as the single most important policy issue affecting the economic and ecological health of the state’s forests. This report describes an assessment of forest land parcelization across a ten county region of northern Minnesota. Using ArcMap as the primary data management and analysis tool, digital files containing the boundaries of all real estate parcels in the ten county study area were analyzed to characterize parcelization activity across private forested landscapes in northern Minnesota. Regression analysis was subsequently used to identify parcel and landscape characteristics that are associated with a parcelized forest landscape. A new metric for characterizing a parcelized forest landscape is proposed to address the deficiencies associated with using average parcel size to describe forest land parcelization. This new metric uses average parcel size, but takes into account the spatial extent of the private forested landscape as well as the distribution of private forest parcel size across this landscape. The study’s large spatial scale makes it unique among forest land parcelization studies.
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    Minnesota Low Carbon Fuels Standard Study
    (2011-06) Taff, Steven J.; Apland, Jeffrey; Kittelson, David B.; Smith, Timothy M.
    Under a Minnesota Department of Commerce, Office of Energy Security contract, the University of Minnesota investigated and developed modeling and analytical frameworks with available data in order to compare the greenhouse gas, economic, and environmental implications of various low carbon fuel standards (LCFS) policies for vehicles operated on Minnesota public roads. This report provides findings of work performed under this contract. A low carbon fuels standard (LCFS) would require any person producing, refining, blending, or importing transportation fuels in Minnesota to reduce these fuels' average carbon intensity (AFCI), measured across the full fuel cycle: feedstock extraction, production, transport, storage, and use. An LCFS is expected to lower overall emissions from the transportation fleet. The framework was used in part to analyze a performance-based LCFS that measures progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions on a lifecycle basis and the economic and environmental impacts on each transportation fuel and production pathway as compared to the state's current policies to replace gasoline consumption with 20 percent ethanol by 2013, and to replace diesel consumption with 20 percent biodiesel by 2015.
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    Reducing CO2 Emissions in the Upper Midwest: Technology, Resources, Economics, and Policy
    (2006) Jones, Kathryn A.; Jordan, Brendan; Keller, Kenneth H.; Taff, Steven J.
    We develop scenarios for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector in the upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Manitoba) by 80% relative to 1990 levels. The report has three major components: 1) an inventory of CO2 emissions from all fossil fuel combustion in the region from 1960-2001, subdividing by economic sector and specific electricity generating station; 2) an evaluation of all electricity resources in the region and all technologies for utilizing them, taking into account the overall scale of the resource, technology costs, and other issues that influence the selection of a certain technology; and 3) the development of a simulation model to examine the impact of various factors (policies, prices, technologies, resources) on the regional electricity supply and its emissions from 2005-2055.