Brainstorming

[goldma99]

• River/stream water depth as instrument for beaver presence.
  • Validate w/ EEAGER sample, then extrapolate using RS data
  • Are there discontinuous cutoffs in water depth in nature?
  • Classify all non-beaver sites according to beaver suitability model criteria, then run sub-sample analyses with varying control groups (only sites with high suitability, only high or mid, any)

[goldma99]

Scotland paper structure idea:

1. Using Sentinel-1 as Patel recommends, measure flooding caused by beaver arrival
2. Translate that flooding into ag damages, using either an established damage function, or quantify using a small validation dataset of complaints, damage reports, or payments from Rural Payments, matched to flooding time and location
3. Look for switching from flood- and grazing-prone crops (cereals, oilseed, etc) to flood resistant commodity conifers or livestock?
   • [ ] Can arable ag land be used for timber production? That's a long-run adjustment, and only one you would make if you believed the beaver situation would get worse with time and that you would get no assistance from the gov't
     4. To quantify impact, develop a dynamic model of farmer behavior and costs. Beaver enters in period t, farmer chooses level of control (non-lethal to lethal) for t+1 and commodity switching in the long-run. In time t, gov't chooses protection of beavers (which increases cost of private lethal control, and potentially non-lethal control, depending on stringency) and level of assistance to farmers, including direct (beaver deceivers, relocation, culling) or indirect (payments, education), which decreases the cost of private control. The welfare here is the benefits of beavers less their private costs to farmers and public cost to infrastructure (i.e., flooding roads).
        • The dynamic question, then, is how will welfare development over time, given a policy regime and damage response function? I can estimate the model using actual beaver development over 2000-2021 (with 4-ish data points: ~2000, 2012, 2017, 2021), then I can estimate counterfactuals: What is the gov't provided beaver deceiver installations to every farm by a river that is suitable to beavers? What if gov't made private culling extremely costly with tight enforcement? What if farmers in beaver-rich areas switched to flood- and grazing-tolerant crops/commodities?

[goldma99]

• 1st stage: conditional on precip, is there a differentiable flooding response after beavers move in
• Check for a flood insurance or disaster claims

[goldma99]

Problem: construct a yearly panel of beaver arrival and density using 3 Tayside surveys.

Potential solutions:

1. Use collage of evidence to fill in the gaps:
   • iNaturalist
   • Cull requests to NatureScot (data privacy sharing)
   • Farmer complaints to NFUS
   • Requests to Rural Payments for financial support
   • Flood/crop/farm insurance claims
     • NFU Mutual
   • News stories